


The Wayward Son

by BleedingInk



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Minor Character Death, Possession, Somewhere around the tail end of season 13
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-20
Updated: 2018-09-16
Packaged: 2019-05-26 04:39:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 46,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14992967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BleedingInk/pseuds/BleedingInk
Summary: Ben Braeden, a seemingly normal pre-Med student from Michigan, is dragged away from his comfortable life when an old childhood friend, Katie Keel, shows up at his college to tell him that he’s in mortal danger. Ben assumes that it’s some sort of elaborate prank until three angels attempt to take him away for some sinister purpose. Ben and Katie then must set out to find the Winchesters, the only hunters known for having frequent deals with angels and who might be able to protect him. However, this could lead to the reveal of some secrets in Ben’s past that maybe were best left forgotten.





	1. Chapter 1

The party was already bustling with people when Ben walked in through the door. He took a moment to push his glasses up his nose and assess what he was working with. It was a nice ambient: the music was loud, but not too much that it drowned out the conversation and laughter. The furniture had been pushed against the wall so people could dance in the living room, there were people walking around with solo cups and some very pretty girls in some very pretty dresses. Two of them, a brunette and a blonde, set their eyes on him when Gary pointed at him from the other side of the room where he was standing with them. Ben put on his best smile and stalked off towards them.

“There he is!” Gary exclaimed. He always spoke like all his sentences were punctuated by an exclamation mark. His sandy blonde hair was slicked off backwards and he smiled wide as Ben greeted him with a fist bump. “Let me introduce you: this is Trish and this is Lila.”

“Nice to meet you, girls,” Ben said. Both girls giggled at him.

“We’ve heard a lot about you,” said Lila (or maybe it was Trish; Gary had been pretty vague when he pointed them out).

“All good things, I hope.”

“Yeah, I was just telling them how you’re a damn genius,” Gary laughed. “Look at this: name all of the carpal bones!”

“Scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate,” Ben recited without taking a breath. The girls cheered and clapped and Gary laughed out loud.

“He’s like a computer, I’m telling you!” he said, slinging an arm around Ben’s shoulders. “Top of the class, would 100% let this guy operate on me.”

“Hope you do, so I can pay all my damn student loans,” Ben replied. The girls laughed again. So, they were definitely open and friendly here. “How about I get a drink for you ladies while I go get something for myself?”

“Thank you, you’re so nice!” said Trish (or maybe Lila).

Ben hadn’t walked three steps when Gary joined him.

“Works every time,” he said with a chuckle.

“Dude, it’s not really that impressive,” Ben insisted as he waited in line for the keg to clear. Technically they shouldn’t be drinking, but in those kind of parties, no one stopped to ask anybody if they were of age or not. “If you used the techniques like I told you…”

“Yeah, yah, whatever,” Gary interrupted him. “So I told you I had been trying to get with Trish for a while now, yes?”

“Which one is Trish?” Ben asked, looking over his shoulders at where the girls were talking to one another and giggling.

“The brunette. Pay attention!” Gary groaned. “For weeks, I’ve been hitting her up and nothing, right? But then out of the blue, _she_ hits _me_ up and asks me if I’m going to be at this party.”

“So you wore her down until she agreed to see you?” Ben asked.

“Don’t judge me. Not all of us have been blessed with perfect cheekbones and a computer brain.” Gary rolled his eyes. “That’s why I needed you here, okay? You to chat Lila up until me and Trish leave and then you keep her company for a couple more hours so I have time to… you know.”

Ben sighed. He thought Gary had invited him to the party so he could unwind after all the exams they were having, but it turns out he was just on wingman duty that night. He didn’t mind. Lila was cute and maybe they could have an entertaining enough conversation.

Or maybe he’d just get lucky for the night. Either way, Ben was rolling with it. He deserved a fun night.

“Fine, but you owe me one,” he said.

Gary’s beam was bursting with joy, as if he could barely contain the impulse to jump and wave his fist in the air.

As they were getting their beers, something caught Ben’s eye.

_Someone._

In between the people swaying to the music or talking or laughing out loud in small groups, she stuck out like a sore thumb, standing by herself in the corner with her arms crossed over her chest. She seemed uncomfortable and maybe even a little sad, though that could have been the effect of her black clothes and the way her shoulders were slumped or the fact she didn’t have a drink in her hand. She slowly moved her head around, her eyes scanning the crowd. She suddenly stopped, staring in Ben and Gary’s direction.

Something rattled in the back of his mind. Like an itch he couldn’t quite reach, like the feeling of having a word on the tip of his tongue. Had he seen this girl somewhere before? Did he know her…?

“Hey.” Gary touched his shoulder and handed him the beers. Ben grabbed them absentmindedly and looked again in the girl’s direction, but he couldn’t find her again. “What’s with you, dude? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

“Yeah,” Ben laughed, awkwardly. “Maybe.”

Gary gave him a weird glance, but Ben shrugged and went back to where Lila and Trish were waiting.

The girl in black clothes slipped away from his mind as he drank and chatted with the girls. Gary made his best impression of Doctor Gardner, one of their teachers, giving a lecture, which was met with laughter and cheers. Trisha inched closer to him with every sip of beer she took and started casually touching his arm and batting her eyelashes at him after a while.

So maybe Gary was selling himself short and this girl really was more into him that he had believed. In any case, Ben did his best to entertain Lila, asking her about her classes and her plans for the future. Lila seemed just as eager to get to know him. They sat together in a couch near Trisha and Gary, and the conversation turned kind of personal.

“So you never knew your dad? That’s so sad.”

“I don’t know. I never felt like I was missing out on anything,” Ben replied. “I have my mom. She’s my best friend, you know? I could always tell her anything.”

“That’s so cool that you’re so close to her,” Lila replied. “Really, that is so nice.”

“Yeah, well.” Ben laughed and scratch the back of his head. “What about you?”

“Oh, you know. Just a normal family. Mom, dad. Some siblings.” She waved her hand as if that wasn’t important, but Ben saw an opportunity to keep chatting. (Gary and Trisha had moved to the dance floor and they were apparently very entertained with each other’s company).

“Really? I always wanted to have a bother,” he commented. “Are your siblings older, younger?”

“I’m… kind of a middle child,” she replied, with a giggle that was slightly uncomfortable, as if she preferred to not talk about it too much. “But you know, I always admired my older brothers. I would do anything for them, anything they ask from me.”

She lifted up her green eyes and Ben was taken aback by the intensity of that look, by the way she worded that phrase. He tried to find something to say, but Gary and Trisha were back before he had the chance to. They were both visibly drunk, glimmering eyes and reddened cheeks. Something had definitely changed in the two minutes he lost them from sight, because Trisha was holding on to Gary’s neck and he had an arm around her waist.

“Hey, guys!” Gary said, with a sound somewhere between a hiccup and a laugh. “Trish and I are heading out to her place. You’ll be okay, right? Ben, will you be a gentleman and take Lila home later?”

“Yeah, absolutely,” Ben promised. “Good luck!”

Gary and Trisha headed for the door, walking with their heads close together. Ben watched as Gary’s hand traveled a little further down to cope a feel of Trisha’s ass, but she didn’t seem to mind.

“Those two really hit it off, huh?” Ben commented.

“Yeah,” Lila said, inching towards him on the couch. “I’m glad Trisha told me to come. I got to meet you.”

Her hand on his knee startled him a little. Through the fog of his tipsiness, her grin seemed huge and sinister, just a never-ending row of excessively white teeth that were suddenly too close to his face. Ben blinked and shook his head and when he looked again, Lila once again looked a normal girl, her curly blonde hair falling on her shoulders and her blue eyes fixed on him quizzically.

“Is there something wrong?”

“No. No. It’s just… oh, you’re done with your drink,” he noticed suddenly. “Let me get you another.”

“That’s not necessary…”

“It’s no problem,” Ben insisted. He took the cup from Lila’s hand but then he stopped to consider. He was slightly buzzed from all the beers he’d had, but still mostly sober. Lila didn’t seem to be drunk at all, but maybe she was one of those people who managed to keep her composure no matter how much she drank. “Or are you okay? Maybe I can bring you some water, if you want,” he offered, though he wasn’t sure where the hell he would get water.

Lila smiled again at him.

“That’s so sweet of you. I think I will have another drink.”

“Coming right up!”

Ben made his way to the keg. The night was going well. He was having fun, Lila seemed to be into him.

Why the hell was he feeling so off then?

Somebody grabbed him by the shoulder, startling him. He turned around to see the girl clad in black that had caught his eye early.

“Ben,” she called him.

Ben focused his eyes on her face. She had straight black hair that fell on her shoulders, a sharp nose and high cheek bones and there was something familiar about her, but he just… couldn’t place her.

She obviously knew him, though, so he decided to save face while he desperately tried to remember her name.

“Hey! Uh… sorry, I didn’t see you… how are you?”

“Listen to me, you’re in danger.”

For a second or two, Ben was certain that he had misheard her. But the girl kept looking at him with such intensity in her brown eyes that it made him shudder. He stepped back, trying to escape those eyes for a moment.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“You have to come with me. Something is after you and it could be very bad…”

“What is this?” Ben interrupted her, now really freaked out by the urgency in her voice. “Is it some kind of prank? Did Gary put you up to this?”

“No,” she said, now visibly frustrated. “This is serious.”

“Okay,” Ben said, taking another step backwards. “What exactly is after me?”

“I’m… I’m not entirely sure,” the girl admitted. “But you have to believe me.”

Ben was now absolutely certain that the last thing he wanted to do was to believe this girl. She was weird, she was way too insistent and she was frankly freaking him out a little bit.

“Look, I don’t know you…”

“Yes, you do,” the girl interrupted him. “I’m Katie. Katie Keel.”

The name told him absolutely nothing. If anything, Ben was now absolutely convinced that he must have been confused when he thought she looked familiar. She must have seen on his face, because she stepped back.

“You don’t remember me?” she asked. She sounded half-disappointed and half-surprised. “You don’t remember the changelings?”

“The what now?”

Katie Keel opened her mouth as if she was about to say something else, but she didn’t get to. Lila showed up and stepped between the two of them.

“Ben, I’m sorry, but Trisha just texted me. She wants me to go pick her up.” She held up her phone so Ben could read the message.

Could this night get any weirder? Or more awkward?

“What happened? Did she fight with Gary?”

“Oh, she wouldn’t say,” Lila replied. “But I’m worried about her. Could you go with me? I already asked for an Uber.”

“Yes, of course.” Ben looked around, found the nearest flat surface – a window ledge – and left the empty cups that he had meant to refill there. “Let’s go.”

Lila stepped aside so Ben found himself once again face to face with Katie Keel. He opened his mouth to tell her something (apologize for not remembering her, wish her good night, let her know he still had no idea what the hell she had been talking about) but she shook her head and turned around. A second later, she had disappeared among the crowd.

Well, that was weird, but there was nothing he could do about it. So he followed Lila to the warm night outside. He stopped for a second to take two gulps of fresh air. His head was throbbing with an oncoming migraine, which was odd. He could have sworn he hadn’t drunk that much.

“Who was that girl?” Lila asked. “Friend of yours.”

“No,” Ben said. “I have no idea who she was.”

If Lila believed him or not, she didn’t say. The car picked them up two minutes later and they slid on the backseat. Ben placed his forehead against the window, hoping the cool glass would alleviate with his headache, but the bumps in the ride proved counterproductive. He moved away and glanced at Lila, who was looking down at her phone, composing a text.

“Hey,” he said. She didn’t raise her eyes, so Ben cleared his throat. “Hey,” he repeated. Lila slowly put her phone down to pay attention to him. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry we had to cut the night short. I had a fun time with you.”

Lila stared at him blankly and the awkward sensation of vertigo, that something wasn’t quite right, returned. But then she smiled and it passed, like a cloud that had temporary covered the sun only to be pushed away by a swift breeze.

“I had fun too, Ben,” she said, softly.

“Maybe we can get together again sometime? Go for a coffee or something?”

“That would be nice.”

She continued texting without adding a word. Ben figured she must have been worried for Trisha and decided not to keep pushing. Maybe his luck would be better some other time.

They arrived to Ben and Gary’s building a few minutes later. Ben got out of the car and opened the door for Lila before guiding her inside.

“It’s a little old,” he commented as he guided her upstairs (because the elevator was broken and the landlord seem to have no intentions whatsoever of fixing it). “But you know, it’s better than living on campus. And it lowers the tuition, too…”

He kept babbling on even though Lila answered to no of his comments while they climbed. She didn’t seem agitated or sick, she just… wasn’t interested in making conversation. Perhaps he should take that as a sign that she wasn’t as into him as he'd thought, but the silence was so unnerving he felt compelled to fill it.

“Anyway… here we are,” he concluded. He fumbled for his keys in font of the door, painfully aware of Lila’s eyes boring into him as he did.

“You’re not what I was expecting.”

Ben froze with the key in his hand and turned towards her.

“I’m sorry?”

“I don’t know,” Lila sighed. “I was hoping you’d be… more.”

“More of what?” Ben said, unable to figure out if he should be offended or not.

“Just… more.” She shook her head. “I just thought I should tell you while I still have the chance.”

That wasn’t an explanation at all. Did that mean they weren’t going for that coffee after all? Ben’s head was hurting badly by this point, so he thought he’d try to make sense of those words in the morning. He turned to the door, but it opened before he could put the key inside.

Gary smiled at him from the doorway.

“We were waiting,” he said. “Come on in.”

Ben frowned at him. He sounded… off, somehow. Not like his usual, animated, exclamation mark at the end of every sentence self.

“Umh… Lila just wanted to pick Trish up…” Ben started, by his voice trailed off when Lila confidently strode inside the apartment. “Okay.”

Gary locked the door behind him. Trish was sitting on their couch, calm and collected and not at all like something bad or unusual had happened to her. She stared in Ben’s direction, as if she expected him to say something.

Either everyone had decided to be weird all of the sudden or Ben had drunk way more than he’d thought.

“What’s going on?” he asked. “Girls, do you want to go home or…?”

“We all want to go home,” Gary said. “And you’re going to help us achieve this.”

“What?” Ben asked, frowning at him. “Gary, what the hell…? Did you smoke something?”

Gary smiled. Ben felt a shiver go down his spine. Gary was always beaming or guffawing, gesticulating exaggeratedly and bouncing on his feet. But now he looked so calm and collected, with his arms resting rigidly at the sides of his body and that little, condescending smile…

Ben stepped backwards, his stomach tightening up in a fearful knot.

“Gary,” he called again. “You’re kind of freaking me out here, bud.”

To be fair, he wasn’t the only one doing that: both Trisha and Lila were doing the same thing, just standing at both sides of Gary, staring at him unblinkingly.

“I’m not you friend,” he said. “He accepted to be my vessel. My name is Manakel and I am an angel of the Lord.”

“Okay.” Ben closed his eyes, trying to shake away the searing pain that suddenly pierced through his brain. His migraine was growing fast and it seemed like it was going to be a really bad one. “Hilarious. I don’t feel too good, so you can stop it now.”

“This is no joke,” Gary explained. There was exasperation on his voice now. He came closer and Ben stepped back again, his back almost grazing the wall now. “We came to you because you were chosen for a purpose. We need you, Benjamin. We need your help to restore what’s left of Heaven.”

“Sure, okay. Can I do that after I’ve slept a little?”

Gary’s face contorted in irritation and before Ben could react, he grabbed him by the lapels of his shirt and pinned him against the wall, knocking the air out of him.

“Listen to me, boy,” Gary said… except he didn’t sound like Gary anymore, not at all. His voice was deeper and louder and his pale green eyes started glowing with a menacing silver light. “You will come with us now. And when the question is asked, you will say yes. You have no idea the high honor you’re being granted…”

The window’s glass exploded with a din, sending shards of glass flying in every direction, startling Gary enough that he let go of Ben’s neck. White thick smoke spread through the room, filling up the air and getting into Ben’s eyes and nostrils. He coughed just as someone grabbed him by the arm and pulled him towards the window.

“Ben, come on!” a female voice shouted.

In the confusion, Ben could do little more than obeyed. He stepped over the ledge into the fire escape stairs and blinked to recover his vision.

Clad in black, with a scarf over her mouth to stop herself from choking, there was a familiar face.

“Katie?”

“Come on!” Katie repeated, as an arm emerged from the window, feeling up the air and trying to grab at them.

Ben stopped thinking and followed Katie down the stairs, their feet pounding loudly over every step. The smoke alarms were going off faintly in the distance and they were almost near the floor.

Trish landed right at the end of the staircase, apparently after taking a three-story leap that should have killed her. But there she was, unharmed, standing in their way with her eyes glowing silver, her hand extended towards them as if she expected to catch them…

The point of a sword appeared through her chest. Her body shook and gargled, the most jarring sound Ben had ever heard. Her skin blinked with the same silver light and then she dropped to the floor, dead. Behind her, stood a blonde girl. She held up the bloody sword and beckoned towards Ben and Katie.

“Hurry up!”

“What the fuck!” Ben exclaimed, because his brain was rattled and nothing made sense anymore. “What the fuck, what the fuck…”

Katie pulled from his hand and they ran until they were next to the girl. She handed the sword to Katie and took up a hunting knife from her belt.

“Hold them off!” she instructed, as she rolled up her sleeve.

Ben’s eyes rose frantically to the stairs, where Gary and Lila had almost gained up on them. Katie raised the sword and took a swipe at them that made them stopped in their tracks. Gary's eyes flared with fury.

“You have no idea what you’re doing!” he screamed. “You have no right to intervene! He’s ours!”

“Well, then, come and take him!” Katie challenged him, brandishing the sword.

They stepped forwards as if they intended to do exactly that, but there was a flash of white, blinding light. Ben covered his eyes for a second with gasped of pain and surprise, and when he looked again, Lila and Gary were gone.

The blonde girl stood behind them with a hand on the wall, pressing against a circle of red ink. No, not ink, Ben realized with a shiver horror.

It was blood.

“What the ever-loving fuck…”

“Move!” the blonde girl told them. “We have to get out of here before they regroup!”

Katie grabbed him by the arm and managed to pull him away before Ben recovered his balance and a certain sense of what was going on.

“No, no, wait!” he said, planting his feet firm on the ground. “You killed Trisha!”

“That wasn’t Trisha,” the blonde girl said, flatly.

But even Katie seemed to be questioning it right now. She stood near Ben and held the sword up.

“Who are you?” she demanded to know.

The blonde girl glared at them with irritation, as if they were making her waste her time with all these questions.

“I’m Claire Novak and you’re welcome,” she declared. “Now, let’s get a move on.”


	2. Chapter 2

Ben was half-convinced that it had to be a hallucination. Somebody slipped something in his drink and he was just having a really bad trip. He had seen his best friend vanish in a flash of light in front of his eyes. He had seen the girl who was currently driving them murder another person.

It couldn’t be real. None of it could be.

Except that the sword was currently lying in the back seat right next to him. In the passing streetlights, he could see the blood staining the blade. Just like the blood that stained the blonde girl’s sleeve – Claire. She’d said her name was Claire. She had killed a person, introduced herself and then urged them to jump in her truck. And they had done it, though for the life of him Ben couldn’t say the reason.

Except that apparently, Katie knew her and she’d had no issue taking the passenger’s seat.

“You’re MotorcycleBarbie98?”

“You must be Katie,” Claire answered calmly. “Nice to finally meet you in person.”

“What’s going on?” Ben asked, not for the first time.

Claire sighed as if she couldn’t believe that Ben wasn’t catching up by now, but she sighed and finally decided to answer him.

“A couple of days ago, my psychic friend felt a disturbance in the Force. Your name came up,” she said. “We posted it in the network and Katie said she knew you.”

“She doesn’t know me. Or… I don’t know her,” Ben mumbled and rubbed his temples. He felt like someone had stabbed him right through the skull as well. His thoughts were scrambled and he could hardly keep his eyes open.

“Really? You don’t remember me?” Katie huffed. “Not at all? Not a single thing about Cicero, Indiana?”

“Well, my mom and I used to live there,” Ben admitted. “I just… I’m sorry… I can’t…”

He looked at his hand and noticed they were trembling violently.

“Can we pull over?”

“Umh… we got murderous angels on our trail, so I’m thinking no.”

“I’m just saying ‘cause I’m going into shock,” Ben explained. “And I might faint. Or vomit. Or both.”

The girls exchanged a look.

When the truck stopped, Ben immediately opened the door and managed a few hesitant steps on his wobbly legs before they gave out. He barely had time to put his hands in front of him as the concrete rose to meet him. His throat burned with painful heaves and a second later, all the beer he had drunk that night came out of his mouth one long, horrible belch.

He stayed where he was, on his hands and knees, hiss glasses foggy from the tears, breathing in slowly and trying to rein in his thoughts.

These girls were psychopaths. They had killed a person and now they were kidnapping him. That was the only logical explanation the panicked side of his mind could come up with. He needed to run away from them. He looked around and noticed they were in a park somewhere: there were trees and benches and a couple staring at him as if he’d just completely ruined their romantic night stroll. Which he reckoned he might have.

Someone grabbed him by the arm and helped him back on his feet.

“Sorry,” Katie said, smiling at the ogling couple. “My friend’s a real lightweight.”

The couple walked away and with them, Ben’s only chance to scream for help.

But it didn’t matter, because as scared shitless as he was of Katie and Claire, he was even more terrified of what he’d seen in Gary’s eyes. That calculated coldness. That fury when Ben had refused to take him seriously.

That wasn’t his best friend. He wasn’t sure who it was, but it wasn’t fun-loving, carefree, girl crazy Gary.

So as improbably as it all sounded, he needed to listen to what these girls had to say. He leaned against the car’s boot, taking in deep gulps of air until he the world stopped spinning around him and he could turn to them and say with a relatively firm voice:

“Okay.” He took off his glasses and cleaned them up on his shirt. “Let’s take it from the top. Angels are real.”

“And dangerous,” Claire said. “And relentless.”

“And they want me for some reason,” Ben added. “And you have a friend who can see the future.”

“Yeah. Never try playing poker with her,” Claire said. The joke fell flat.

“And you know me, even though I have no idea who you are.”

Katie flinched and looked away, but it was fast and then she was looking back at him with those dark eyes that seemed just… so expressive. The rest of her face remained an impenetrable mask, but her eyes were unnervingly deep. Haunting as if they had seen too many things. Ben swallow and shook his head, slowly to not make his migraine worse.

“And you guys are… psychics, too?”

“We’re hunters,” Claire replied.

“Of angels?”

“Among other things.”

Of all the replies she could have given to him that was by far the most disturbing one.

“What the…? What else is out there?!”

The girls exchanged a look. Claire even had a little smirk upon her lips.

“Try not to overexert yourself,” she told him, giving him a pat on the shoulder. “We should keep going. We have to take you somewhere safe.”

“Wait, hold on.” Ben rubbed his temples. “We can’t go.”

“Didn’t you hear a word of what I just say?” Claire huffed. “Angels aren’t going to stop until they have you…”

“Exactly,” Ben interrupted her. “They will do anything to get to me, right?”

Claire nodded impatiently, as if she thought he was being obtuse on purpose just to annoy her.

“Then we have to pick up my mom first,” Ben said. “She’s only an hour-drive away. Please, I just want to make sure she’s safe too.”

Claire’s expression softened a little, but Katie clenched her jaw.

“They’ll be expecting you to do just that.”

“So, what? I’m just supposed to leave her all alone?” Ben shot back.

“We can worry about your mom later. The most important thing is to get you out of danger…”

“Well, I’m worried about my mom _now_ ,” Ben shot back and crossed his arms over his chest. “And I’m not going to go anywhere with you unless I know she’s coming as well.”

Kate stared at him with open irritation and suddenly Ben felt very, very small. If she decided to knock him out (which was going to be easy to do in the state he was in), there was nothing he could do about it. If she decided that saving his life wasn’t going to be worth it if he was going to protest about it all the way, then that thing that was wearing Gary’s face would return and take him to do who knew what with him.

Luckily for him, Claire was there to intervene.

“We can make a little detour,” she decided. “How good are you at convincing your mom to do weird things without asking too many questions?”

Ben was certain than calling his mom in the middle of the night to announce he was coming home out of the blue would already alarm her enough. But given the circumstances, it was better to be as concise as he could be.

His heart was thrumming as his mom’s cellphone rang on and on without an answer. He kept his eyes fixed on the road and fields they left behind at a speed he was half-certain was illegal and tried to shut down all the worst case scenarios in his head. What if the angels had already got to her? What if they hadn’t, but she forgot to charge her cellphone and he couldn’t reach her in time? What if when he got there she had the same rigid, serious demeanor as Gary instead of her usual kind smile and…?

“Hello?”

“Mom!” Ben exclaimed, relief washing over him. “Listen, don’t get scared. I’m gonna be there in a little while.”

“What?” Lisa’s voice became a little louder, as if it was waking up along with the rest of her. “Ben? What do you mean? You said you were too busy studying this weekend…”

“Something… something happened,” Ben said, cringing. He wasn’t exactly lying to her, but it felt a little bit like doing so. “It’s a long story. I need you to do something for me. I’m going to send you some pictures. Get my Sharpies and…”

“Ben, slow down. What do I need your Sharpies for?”

Ben was well aware that Katie was looking at him over her shoulder in the front seat. There was really no way to beat around the bush.

“To… paint some warding sigils on the walls.”

There was a stunned silenced on the other end of the line.

“What?” Lisa said in the end. “Ben, are you drunk?”

That was a very logical question and Ben couldn’t in any way fault his mother for asking it.

“I wish,” he sighed.

“Benjamin Isaac…!”

“Mom, please, believe me,” Ben begged. “I wouldn’t be asking you if it wasn’t important. I need you to do this so you can be safe.”

“Safe from what?”

Ben decided not to answer to that. It was going to be hard enough to convince her to do this without having to add angels into the mixture.

“Just safe,” he insisted. “Please, promise me you’ll do it. I’ll text you the pictures of what you need to draw. You have to copy them as exactly as you can on both floors.”

Another silence followed those declarations. Ben prepared to insist once again that she did what he was asking, that he would explain everything when he was there and that she just please, _please_ , needed to do this.

“Okay,” Lisa said instead. “Okay. I’m going to do that now.”

Ben breathed out. There was definitely a lot he still needed to deal with, but this was an important first step. Katie gave him her cellphone so he could send the sigils to his mom.

“Where did you learn all of this?” Ben asked. Despite the situation, his inner curiosity he couldn’t help but to push his glasses up his nose and read about the sigils. “What page is this?”

“It’s an encrypted blog,” Claire explained. “We have it set up so we can share lore and information about cases with other hunters around the country. And to keep tabs on each other.”

Her voice dropped an octave when she said this and Ben didn’t have to ask why. He had seen the angels. He had seen what they were capable of doing. If they were out there fighting things like that every day…

“So what else is real?” he asked. “Demons?”

“Yup.”

“Ghosts?” Ben added. Claire’s silence was more than enough confirmation. “Werewolves? Vampires? Bigfoot?”

Katie coughed softly. Ben could have almost believe she was chuckling, but when he looked closely he noticed she was just as serious as Claire.

“Why don’t you get some sleep?” she proposed. “We still have a while until we get there.”

Ben decided that was code for not really wanting to talk to him. He toyed with his cellphone, hoping that he wouldn’t lose signal or that it wouldn’t die off before he had the chance to talk to his mother again or that nothing bad happened on this endless goddamn trip…

His phone chirped. It was an image of the living room’s paper wall with one of the sigils drawn on it in black Sharpie.

Ben sighed deeply and leaned his head back on the seat.

 

* * *

 

“… so how do you move?”

“I use fake IDs to rent cars. It’s cheaper.”

Someone clicked their tongue with disapproval.

“You should have your own car. It’s more trustworthy, especially when you start collecting weapons.”

The other person didn’t answer.

“How long have you been doing this? A year?” asked the first person.

“More or less. But I’ve known about these things since I was a kid.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

Ben’s brain started waking up and remembering where he was and why his neck ached so badly. He had fallen asleep in a weird angle and the movement of the car hadn’t helped too much. He decided not to make any sound that would give him away. Claire and Katie were talking, and he didn’t mean to eavesdrop, not really. But he had the impression this was a conversation that would be abruptly interrupted as soon as they realized he was listening in.

“There’s more of us out there than you know,” Claire said. “And it’s important to have a partner. Someone to cover your back.”

“You hunt alone,” Katie pointed out.

“That’s because I’m a dumbass, but I get back-up when I need it. Some cases are too dangerous to take on your own…”

“I’m doing fine, thanks.”

Katie sounded snappy and Ben could almost hear the shrug in Claire’s voice when she said:

“Alright.”

A long silence followed and Ben figured it was a time as good as any to stir awake. He groaned and stretched his arms above his head. His back and neck were going to kill him the following day, but honestly, at that point they were the least of their problems.

“Where are we?” he asked.

He took off his glasses, cleaned them up with his shirt a little and put them back on to look outside the window. He must have slept for the better part of an hour, because he immediately recognized the houses and they were passing by. He checked his phone, but the battery was dead. It didn’t matter. In just a few more moments, they would take a turn around the block and then…

Ben bolted out of the truck even before Claire turned off the engine. The lights were on downstairs and everything seemed normal and quiet: the garden with the perfectly cut grass, the neighbor houses darkened and silent…

“Mom!” Ben called out, not caring who could listen to him as he ran past the fence and towards the door. “Mom!”

The door opened and there she was, wrapped in her robe and slippers. Her dark hair was a mess and she looked pale without her makeup, but the eyes that stared at him, full of worry and surprise, were hers. Ben cried out in relief and ran to hug her before she even said a word.

“Ben, what’s going on?” Lisa asked, wrapping her arms tight around him. When he was a child, Ben always thought his mom was one tall lady, but in recent years he had grown enough to pass her, if only by a few inches. Still, she ran her hands through his hair and place them on his cheeks to make him look at her. “I’ve been reading the news on my phone. They’re saying they found a dead body near your building?”

Ben opened his mouth and then closed it again. He wasn’t even sure where to start taking to her about this. He looked over his shoulder to see that Claire and Katie were already coming towards the door, each carrying a duffle bag Ben wasn’t sure he had seen on them before.

“Good night, Mrs. Braeden,” Katie said, calmly. "Sorry to show up like this."

 

* * *

 

Ben had to hand it to Lisa. She took it much better than he had.

“Angels,” she repeated, calmly.

They were sitting in the living room together. Well, Ben and Lisa were sitting: Katie was looking out of the window as if she expected someone to come creep up on the garden, while Claire moved around the room with her own marker, double checking the sigils Lisa had drawn over the wallpaper.

“You do believe me, right?”

He needed to hear it. He was already half-convinced all of this was happening for real and it wasn’t a nightmare or a hallucination. But he needed to hear someone he knew and loved telling him he wasn’t losing his mind.

Lisa looked at him gravely. After an interminable moment, she nodded.

“I do. I don’t know why,” she added, rubbing her temples. “But I do believe you.”

“You’re having a migraine too?”

“I’ve had it since you called me,” Lisa confessed, but she smiled as if to indicate that nothing was wrong. “I already took a pill, but… it seems like it’s just going to be one of those days, huh?”

Ben smiled back at her. There were days, especially after their car accident, when they both have suffered from strong, inexplicable migraines. They’d both had doctors examine them endlessly, running all sort of tests on them, but there seemed to be nothing physically wrong with them. In the end, they had concluded it was psychosomatic and it had to do with the trauma and that stress was probably a trigger.

He had never been too convinced by that explanation. His mom was a laid back yoga instructor, the word stress didn’t even register for her; yet the migraines kept happening. It might have been the reason that he became interested in medicine, despite knowing he’d have to study for years and pay for his student loans until the day he died.

A loud clatter interrupted his conversation. Claire rummaged through her bag until she extracted a strange, pointy object that shone silver underneath the living room’s light.

“I’m going to make a phone call,” she announced and handed the thing to Ben. “It’s an angel blade. If one attacks you, try to stab it with it.”

“Then again, if you’re close enough to an angel to stab it, they’re way too close and you’re probably already dead,” Katie added, closing the curtains.

“You’re a ray of sunshine, aren’t you?” Ben groaned, but he clutched the blade closer to his chest. He didn’t think he would be able to stab anything with it, but he’d rather have it than not.

“Behave, you two,” Claire said, already with her cellphone next to her ear. “Castiel? Yes, it’s me. ‘Cause I knew you weren’t sleeping. Listen, I have a situation here…”

She walked away into the kitchen before Ben could hear anything else, leaving him, Lisa and Katie and in a deep, awkward silence. Katie remained by the window, holding Claire’s sword next to her, as if she was ready to pick it up and start fighting at any moment. Ben felt too uneasy to stay put, so he stood up and started pacing over the carpet. The angel blade felt heavy in his hand and… dangerous, somehow, the more he looked at it. He tried not to think about it too much.

“So…” Lisa cleared her throat: “How do you two know each other?”

“We don’t,” Ben said.

Katie scoffed at him.

“I lived right down the street!”

“You must not have been that memorable, then.”

Katie opened her mouth to protest, but then Lisa stood up.

“Wait,” she said, walking up to her. “I do remember you.” She gently brushed a lock of hair from Katie’s face and watched her closely. “You’re… you’re Dana’s girl, aren't you?”

Katie clenched her jaw and something indecipherable flashed through her eyes. It dissolved quickly into a smug expression of satisfaction.

“Yes, thank you!” she said. “Dana Keel is my mom.”

“Oh, my God, how is she?” Lisa asked, as if she’d run into an old acquaintance in the store. “How are you? How did you end up… dealing with… these things?” she concluded, gesturing vaguely at the sword.

Katie licked her lips.

“It’s kind of a long story.”

“I can imagine,” Lisa said. She put a hand on Katie’s shoulder and gently guided her towards the couch. “Do you want a glass of water?”

Katie opened her mouth and closed it again. It was almost as if she had been taken aback by all that kindness.

“I… yes, that’d be nice.”

“Ben, why don’t you bring her one?”

Ben blinked at his mom, incredulous. Katie glanced at him, her beam growing wider.

“Yes, Ben, go fetch me one.”

Ben glared at her and bit his tongue. She’d saved his life. Yes, she was unbearable and irrationally angry at him for not remembering something from ten years before, but she’d saved his life. He needed to keep that in mind, he told himself as he walked into the kitchen.

Claire seemed to be having a very agitated conversation with someone.

“Yes. Yes, Dean, I get it! Shit!” she shouted. “Why are you so freaked out? Who the hell is this guy?”

Whoever this Dean person was, he didn’t bothered to answer, because Claire stared at her cellphone as if she couldn’t believe the call had ended.

“Well, that went smoothly,” she commented.

“Did it?” Ben asked, frowning.

Instead of answering, Claire grabbed the pen and notepad Lisa kept next to the fridge to write down what groceries she needed.

“They’re sending someone over to escort you and your mom to safety,” she informed him as she scribbled something down. “But just in case, they wanted you to have these coordinates. If anything happens, you need to get your ass there and look for Sam and Dean Winchester.”

She ripped the paper, folded it in two and handed it to him. Ben instinctively put it away in his jean’s pocket.

“Wait, just us? What about you and Katie?”

“I have some business in South Dakota that I need to go back to,” Claire explained. “And Katie is a free agent. This is way above the pay grade of most hunters, so you can’t blame her if she wants to opt out.”

Ben thought that if Katie wanted to have her glass of water and then get the hell out of his house that was fine by him. He didn’t say it out loud.

“So who are these Winchester people?”

“Hunters. Very good ones,” Claire said. “They know how to deal with angels and demons better than anyone else. And they’re very good people.” She cringed. “Don’t tell them I said that.”

“Your… secret is safe with me?” Ben said. He grabbed a glass from the cupboard and started filling it up. When he turned around, he noticed Claire was still staring at him with a concerned expression. “What is it?”

“Look, I don’t mean to scare you…”

“Yeah, I think we’re way past that stage.”

“…. but Patience said something bad would happen if angels got to you,” Claire continued, ignoring his quip. “Not just to you, but… to everybody.”

“Everybody?” Ben repeated, frowning. “What’s that mean? Like my mom and my friends or…?”

“ _Everyone_ , Ben,” Claire insisted. “We didn’t post this on the blog, because we didn’t want to cause a panic, but she was talking major catastrophes. I’ve never seen her like that. It was some world-ending prophecy shit. And it all starts with you, somehow.”

Ben stared at the glass of water in his hand. Part of him wanted to say he didn’t believe in prophecies and predictions and psychic stuff. But then again, it wasn’t that much of a leap of a faith at this point.

“So what am I supposed to do?”

Claire shrugged. “Try not to get captured?”

“Right. No pressure or anything.” He sighed. “You know, I always thought being some sort of chosen one would be more fun and less pants-shittingly terrifying.”

He walked past towards her back towards the living room. His mind was buzzing, but he still tried to keep his tone calm as he approached the couch where Katie and Lisa were sitting:

“Here’s your…”

The glass exploded in his hand. Ben gasped in pain as the shards sank in his hand. The entire house shook and the windows vibrated as if an invisible hand had pushed against them. A loud, shrilling noise invaded the air, preventing Ben from hearing what his mother was saying even as she ran to him and put her arms around him.

Katie and Claire were suddenly next to them as well, both of them holding their weapons up.

“They’re here.”


	3. Chapter 3

The house shook again and a small crack appeared on the window.

“They can’t get in. They’re going to try and smoke us out,” Claire muttered. “Do you have a car?”

Lisa’s eyes were wide and she seemed terrified. But she nodded.

“The… the keys are upstairs.”

“I can hot-wire it,” Katie suggested.

Ben eyed her with distrust.

“I think it’ll be faster if we go get the keys…”

“You really want to argue about this right now, dude?”

Another shake punctuated her words. The light bulb above their heads blinked and exploded, sparkles flying over them and landing on the carpet. A small flame rose of it and Ben instinctively stepped on it to turn it off.

“Alright, hot-wiring it is.”

They ran to the laundry room and towards the garage…

It occurred to him a second too late that they should have stayed inside of the living room, protected by the sigils. They should have waited another minute. They should have gone upstairs to get the damn keys.

As soon as they stepped in towards the car, the garage’s door burst open right in the middle, the splinters flying in the air, the iron bars that kept it in place bending with a clatter. Ben managed to grab his mom’s arm and pulled her back.

“Go back inside! Run, mom…!”

Someone punched him in the stomach. Or at least that was how it felt: he flew through the air and was pinned against the further wall, his feet hanging uselessly over the floor. He fought against it, but it was as if a giant hand kept him pressed where he was, suffocating him. His vision was blurry; his glasses had fallen over somewhere.

“Ben!” Lisa shouted.

He couldn’t even turn his head to look at her. His neck was paralyzed and black spots were appearing on his vision. Still, he could see the figure that walked inside through the broken door: her eyes were glowing silver and she had a hand extended towards him.

“Didn’t expect you to give us so much trouble, boy,” she said, as she calmly walked towards him. Her blonde hair was spiked by static, forming a halo around her face. “Why can’t humans just do what they’re told?”

He recognized the voice. He’d spent hours earlier that night listening to it.

“Lila.”

Lila stepped close enough that he could make out her features. They were deformed in a snarl of rage.

“My name is Sorath,” she corrected him. “And you’re coming with me.”

Ben would have liked to say something witty or defiant. Or spit in her face. Or done anything but stare at her, unable to move or to fight back.

He didn’t have to. From somewhere to his left, Katie sprang to her feet, the sword held high. Before she could even graze the angel with it, though, Sorath raised her other hand. Katie gasped as she too was lifted into the air. Her body smashed against the side of Lisa’s car and she fell to the floor with a moan of pain.

The small distraction served so that Ben could look around. Claire and Lisa had retreated inside. He could only hope Claire was about to use one of those blood thingies she had used before. Sorath turned his attention back to him. The forced that had been holding Ben disappeared and he dropped to the cold concrete floor, trying to catch his breath.

He blinked and squinted, trying to focus his vision. Katie was also on the floor, cradling her stomach, but moving. Her hand inched towards the sword on the floor, moving slowly, why was she moving so slowly…?

Ben suddenly understood what he needed to do.

“Fuck you,” he muttered. And then a little louder: “Fuck you, you bitch! I’m not going anywhere!”

It worked: Sorath’s nostrils flared with rage. She grabbed Ben by the shoulder and propped him up, only for her fist to smash in his face. A searing pain went through his head, like his skull was about to split. His mouth was suddenly filled with the metallic taste of blood.

“Oh, yes, you little arrogant boy,” she said. “You are…”

Sorath interrupted herself and turned around, her arm raised high to repel an attack. Ben saw the glimmer of the blade and when Sorath turned around to deal with the attacker, Ben half crawled, half dragged himself away from her… to the figure still crouching on the floor.

“Katie…” he called her.

Katie looked up, her brown eyes glimmering feverishly. There was an ugly wound in her forehead gushing blood and her right arm was bent in a strange position. Her left hand held unto the sword’s hilt, but Ben knew instantly she couldn’t have raised it with how much pain she was in. She looked like she couldn’t even stand up.

Sorath was fighting a new comer with fast, blurry movements, their blades clinking against each other. The guy in the blue shirt that, from Ben’s perspective, literally had shown up out of nowhere seemed to be standing his ground against the angel with ease.

It didn’t matter; as long as he kept her distracted. This was a chance they were not going to have again.

“Katie, can you move?” he asked her. “We have to get out of here.”

Katie gave him hesitant nod, so Ben grabbed her good arm and threw it around his neck. Katie tried to help by getting on her knees, but the movement caused her to moan in pain.

Sorath’s eyes turned towards them.

That was what the guy in blue seemed to have been waiting. He lunged forwards and the blade sank directly in the angel’s chest. She screamed loud as a hot, white light invaded the small garage. Ben closed his eyes. His head was pulsing with a pain like he’d never known.

Someone touched him on the shoulder.

“Are you Ben?” the guy in the blue shirt asked. “I’m here to help you.”

“What…?” Ben started to say but he couldn’t go on.

The same force as before had grabbed him by the throat and was suddenly pulling him a way, in a vertiginous free fall into darkness.

 

* * *

 

Every inch of his body ached.

That was the first thing Ben was aware of when he came to. He felt like someone had run him over with a truck, like he was coming down with the flu and like he had the worst hangover ever, all at the same time. His head was pulsating with a pain worse than any migraine he had ever suffered and every one of his limbs felt like they weighed a ton. He was lying on his back somewhere where the ground was uncomfortably hard, but he couldn’t muster the energy to get up from it.

And to make it all worse, someone was shaking him.

“Ben. Ben, get up, dammit!”

“No,” he groaned.

“Well, at least you’re alive,” the voice that was trying to wake him up said.

“Are you sure of that?” Ben asked, still refusing to open his eyes. “Because I’m pretty sure I just died and this is Hell.”

There was a long sigh. Then two fingers grabbed him by the ear and twisted it hard. Ben screamed in pain and sat up, trying to get away from the cruel pinching. He opened his eyes and blinked several times, his blurry vision reminding him he had lost his glasses somewhere.

Back in his garage. Where he had been attacked by Sorath.

All the memories of what’d happened came rushing back to him. He turned to see that the person kneeling next to him was Katie, with the silver sword resting on his knees.

“Oh, good, you’re up,” she said, with a smile of fake satisfaction that dissolved instantly. “Come on, we have to go.”

“Go where?” Ben asked. He rubbed his eyes and squinted in a vain attempt to see his surroundings better. “Where are we?”

Katie opened her mouth and closed it again. She looked around, as if she was just now taking that into consideration.

“I… I have no idea,” she confessed.

Ben couldn’t offer any better answer when he managed to stand up, ignoring the way his muscles screamed every time he moved even a little. There were in a field of some kind, with nothing but tall grass up to their knees all around. The sky wasn’t dark anymore, as a soft pink light was starting to rise and make the stars disappear. Ben memorized the direction as that being the east, though he wasn’t sure that would make any difference if they had no idea which direction they should be going towards in the first place.

“Well… shit,” he muttered.

“Yeah,” Katie agreed. Now that he looked at her up close, he could see the sorry state she was in: there was a large bruise on the right side of her face and her lower lip was swollen and bloody. “I don’t know what happened. Your girlfriend beat us both up…”

“She wasn’t my girlfriend.”

“… and there was a flash of light and we woke up here,” Katie continued, ignoring him. “I don’t even know how long we’ve been out.”

“And what about the guy?”

“What guy?”

“You know, the guy.” Ben lifted his hand. “Yay high, blue shirt?”

Katie opened her mouth to answer…

The grass parted and they both jumped back, startled. Someone had just sat up, not far from them. Ben squinted, but all he could make out was a stain of blue in the middle of all the green.

“That’s him!” he exclaimed. “That guy!”

The guy turned his head towards them. Slowly, he raised to his feet and took a step towards them…

Katie raised the sword with her left hand.

“Stay back!”

“Okay!” the guy said, putting both his hands up. “Calm down, please…”

“Katie, what are you doing?” Ben asked, surprised. “He helped us!”

“He’s an angel!” Katie accused him. “There’s no other way he could have survived that fight!”

“I’m not… please, I don’t want to hurt you,” the guy tried to argue.

Ben slowly stepped away from him nonetheless, until he was crouching behind Katie.

It made sense. He had been touching them before they were pulled away. If Claire had used another of those blood sigils at that moment, then it made sense that they would’ve been blasted off along with him. That explained why they had woken up in the middle of nowhere and why they were in such a bad shape.

Well, the beating they had taken probably hadn’t helped either.

“Let me explain!” the guy said. “I’m not an angel. Not completely. I’m… the son of one.”

“Sure, okay,” Ben said. He tried to sound sarcastic, but if he was being honest with himself, he had no way of knowing if angels could have kids or not. This was all still very new to him.

“My name is Jack Kline,” the guy said. “Sam and Dean Winchester sent me to help you.”

“Yeah, right,” Katie scoffed. “Why should we believe you?”

“Because I’m telling you the truth!” Jack argued. He seemed frustrated that they didn’t consider that a good enough reason.

Katie still pointed the sword at him, as if she was ready to stab him right through the chest. However, Ben put a hand on the hilt and slowly made her lower it. Katie stared at him, incredulous.

“Are you for real?” she asked him.

“Claire said we should trust the Winchesters,” Ben pointed out.

“I’m sure she didn’t mention this guy.” Katie jerked her head towards Jack.

“Well, no,” Ben admitted. “But think about it, Katie. If he wanted to hurt us, he would have already. You can’t exactly fight him with one arm dislocated.”

Katie looked down at her right arm that hanged uselessly at her side. She almost looked ashamed, as if she hadn’t expected Ben or anyone else to notice.

“Oh, I can help with that…” Jack said and took a step towards them. Immediately Katie lifted up the sword again.

“Easy there, cupcake,” she warned him.

“I’m not a cupcake. I’m a nephilim!”

“Do you go through life just distrusting everybody?” Ben asked her. He was tired, he was worried and he was in too much pain to be patient with Katie right now.

“Yes!” Katie hissed, turning to him. “Because if I didn’t, I’d already be dead!”

Ben was about to tell her how sad that was when Jack moved faster than he thought possible: in a blink, he was next to Katie, grabbing her by the wrist so she couldn’t use the sword. Katie gasped and Ben took a step to help… but all Jack did was place his free hand on Katie’s forehead and then let go. Katie stumbled backwards, blinking perplexed. The bruise on her face slowly disappeared and the cut in her lip stopped bleeding and closed itself. Katie raised her right arm, closing and opening her fist as if she couldn’t quite believe she could move it again.

Before Ben had time to be surprised by that, Jack turned around and also placed a hand on his forehead.

It was as if a heavy weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Suddenly his sore muscles were loose and relaxed once again and his head stopped aching. His exhaustion was gone just as completely as if he had slept for twelve hours straight in a comfortable bed.

But that wasn’t the most amazing thing of all.

Everything that surrounded him suddenly came into clear focus, like when the doctor adjusted the gradation of the new glasses he was trying out and the letters in the poster stopped being unintelligible black smudges. Except this was his actual eyes doing that. And he was seeing was far more than smudges and letters.

The clouds in the sky looked spongier and whiter. He could distinguish the individual blades of the grass he was standing in. And he didn’t have to squint so he could make out Katie and Jack’s faces. He suddenly was able to see more of their features, like the freckles on the bridge of Katie’s nose and Jack’s popping blue eyes.

“Holy shit,” he muttered. He closed his eyes and opened them again, but the world around him was still just as vibrant. “Holy… you… dude, did you just… cure my myopia?”

Jack looked slightly embarrassed.

“I’m sorry. Were you attached to it?”

Ben had just had the craziest night of his entire life. He didn’t know where he was, he was being hunted by almost invincible supernatural beings, and he was worried to death about his best friend and his mother.

But despite all of that, he threw his head back and burst into laughter.


	4. Chapter 4

Katie obviously wasn’t happy about it, but it was pretty clear by then that Jack meant them no harm.

“Dean asked me to take you directly to the bunker,” Jack told them. “I can teleport you there. And afterwards I can go back to check on your mother.”

“Perfect. Let’s do that right now,” Ben agreed.

Katie still looked suspicious and clutched the sword too close, but she nodded and stepped up. Jack placed his hands on the both of them and…

… nothing happened. No force throwing them to the air, no sudden pull in their stomachs. They were still standing still in the same tall grass field as before.

“Umh… Jack?” Ben asked. “We’re still here, buddy.”

Jack blinked in confusion and pressed his hands harder against their foreheads. They remained in the field, just as they had a second later. Jack frowned and placed both hands on Ben’s head.

“Okay, this is getting a little awkward,” Ben said.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” Jack admitted. He sounded just as confused as they were. He stepped back and touched his own head, then his stomach, as if he was looking for some sort of invisible wound. He frowned again. “The blast,” he deduced. “I think it temporarily hindered my wings.”

“Your what now?” Ben asked, but Kate started laughing before Jack could answer.

“Oh, well, that’s just _perfect_!” she exclaimed.

“Actually, it’s less than ideal… where are you going?” Jack asked.

Katie had spun on her heels and now she was heading in a seemingly random direction, making her way through the tall grass as if she knew exactly where she was heading. Ben and Jack exchanged a look and promptly started following her, since she seemed to have all the intention of leaving them behind.

“Umh… Katie? Where are we going?”

“Well, since we’re being hunted by the supernatural equivalent of the Terminator, I figured we should keep moving until angel boy here gets his limp wings issues fixed.”

“You don’t have to be mean about it…” Ben started protesting, but Jack interrupted him.

“She’s right. We can’t stay here. We should probably head somewhere we can guard.” He made a pause and put a hand on his stomach again. A low growl came from it. “Eating and resting for a bit would also help me recover.”

“How long do you reckon that’s going to take?” Ben asked, a little nervous.

“Maybe a couple of hours.” Jack shook his head. “I’m sorry, Ben. I’m sure you’re worried about your mother.”

“Claire was with her,” Katie said. “I’m sure she’ll take her somewhere safe. For now all we can do is keep moving. We can try to get in contact with them later.”

Ben searched his pockets, but then he remembered he had left his cellphone charging back at home in Battle Creek. He wasn’t sure how far away they were from there. Hell, he wasn’t sure they were in Michigan anymore. It was like that game of trying to find the airport, except worse because the sun was rising behind them and despite Jack curing all his wounds, Ben still felt exhausted and scared to death.

And he hated walking in silence like this, because it gave him way too much time to think. What if the angels were already coming after them? He was useless in a physical fight, and he didn’t know if Katie and Jack would be able to fend them off. He needed to learn to do that blood banishing sigil and read as much as he could find on the hunters’ blog. There had to be something there about how to keep the angels away, right? He couldn’t always rely on someone else saving his ass.

What he hated was that he, and by extension his mom, were in that mess in the first place. What had they done?

After a while walking (he had no way of knowing how long it had been, exactly) they stepped onto a road. Across from them, there was another tall grass field and there wasn’t a car coming in miles around. Katie looked left and right.

“East or west, boys?” she asked.

“This road actually runs north to south,” Jack informed her. Katie slowly turned to look at him.

“Do you come with a navigation system incorporated?”

“South, Katie,” Ben intervened. “Let’s just head south.”

He didn’t know exactly why he had chosen south. He just knew that he needed Katie to stop antagonizing the only person that could offer him answers and probably get him out of the mess he was in too. Katie shrugged and once again lead the way, holding unto Claire’s sword.

“Your friend is very mean,” Jack pointed out.

“She’s not my friend,” Ben answered, glaring at the back of Katie’s head before he turned to the nephilim. “Can I ask you a question? Do you know what the hell do angels want with me?”

Jack looked sheepish for a moment.

“I’m not sure exactly, either,” he admitted. “Neither are Sam or Dean. But we suspect it has to do with your father.”

Ben started at him, perplexed.

“What the… why? I never met the guy.”

Now it was Jack who looked confused.

“You… never?”

“No. Hell, my mom doesn’t even remember who he is.”

That got Katie to look at them over her shoulder.

“Really?”

“She went to a lot of parties and biker bars in her twenties,” Ben explained. He immediately closed his fists, because if any of them made a comment about his mom, he was going to have to fight them, allies or not.

Katie, however, only let out a chuckle.

“Go, Mrs. Braeden!”

Ben rolled his eyes at her. But saying it had to with his father answered exactly none of his questions. Jack seemed reluctant to say anymore now.

“Perhaps it’s best you wait to discuss this with Dean,” he said.

Ben opened his mouth to ask why, but a faint sound in the previously empty road interrupted him. In the distance, a black pickup truck came rolling down towards them. Katie’s eyes lit up immediately.

“Looks like our ride is here, boys.”

She handed the sword to Ben and took off her leather jacket. She was wearing a black tank top underneath that she pulled down a little to give herself some extra cleavage. Ben quickly looked away only to notice that Jack was frowning in confusion to him, so he turned back to Katie, who was folding her top to uncover her stomach and part of her back. She had a tattoo on her lower back, a pentagram inside a sun. He couldn’t take a good look at it before Katie stepped closer to the road and raised her thumb up.

The truck passed them by and just when Ben thought that the driver hadn’t seen them (or was a straight woman and they would have better luck offering up Jack), it slowed down and pulled over. Katie ran towards it and by the time Ben and Jack did the same, she was already leaning over the driver’s window, puffing up her chest a little more than it was necessary.

“… my friends and I got a little bit lost after the party and it seems our ride left without us,” she was saying, in a softer, cheerier tone than she had ever used talking to them. “Do you mind taking us to, umh…?”

“To the city?” the man in the truck ask. From where Ben was standing, he looked to be well into his forties, with a beard and a suspicious scowl in his face.

Ben was thinking there was no way he was going to believe whatever convoluted story Katie was trying to sell him, but then the man lowered his eyes to Katie’s chest for a second.

“Sure, sweetheart,” he said in the end. “Tell your friends to hop in the back and you can ride right in here with me.” He patted the empty passenger seat by his side.

“You’re a lifesaver, sir!” Katie said, with the biggest smile. She turned to the boys and her smile faltered for a second as she dropped her voice an octave. “You better appreciate everything I’m doing for you. Don’t let him see the sword.”

She turned around and Ben watched him go, not knowing whether to be impressed or slightly aghast. Either way, at least they wouldn’t have to keep on walking. He and Jack climbed on the bed quickly and just as Katie had instructed him, Ben placed the sword by his side on the floor and covered it with her jacket.

As soon as Katie closed the door on the passenger’s side, the truck got on its way again.

“She’s mean, but she seems to be very resourceful,” Jack commented.

“Yeah, resourceful,” Ben repeated. “That was the word I was looking for.”

Jack was apparently unable to register anything he said as sarcastic. Ben decided to let it go for the time being. He opened his mouth to ask him another question about the angels when something at the side of the road caught his eye.

It wasn’t anything extraordinary. Just a sign that indicated the distances, like there where next to any road. The thing that called his attention was what was written on it.

Cincinnati, 62 miles.

“Cincinnati?” he repeated and maybe it was the sun beating in his head or the thirst or the ever-present fear in the back of his head, or maybe a combination of all three, but he suddenly felt the impulse to start laughing like maniac again. “How the fuck did we end up in Ohio?”

 

* * *

 

The driver dropped them off at the first Biggerson’s they passed by. He seemed a lot crankier than when he had picked them up and only grumbled when Ben leaned against the window to thank him for the ride. He took off again without even looking and soon they lost sight of him on the busy street ahead of them.

“The hell was his problem?” Ben asked.

“He might have been grumpy because I didn’t let him cope a feel.” Katie shrugged. She had pulled down her tank top again and despite the day becoming warmer with every passing minute, she put her jacket on as soon as Ben handed it to her. “That means that it’ll take a while for him to tell anyone about seeing us.” She patted her back pocket and extracted a brown leather wallet. “All the better for us.”

“You stole his wallet?” Ben exclaimed, scandalized.

“That’s what he gets for being a handsy creep,” Katie replied. “And besides, we’re going to need the money to move around. Unless angel boy can get the motor running?”

Jack stood perfectly still for a second or two and then shook his head.

“I feel weak,” he said. “Perhaps eating and resting for a bit will help.”

“Well, lucky for us, we’re still on time for the breakfast special,” she commented, yanking her head towards the Biggerson’s.

Ben detested that chain of restaurants. The food was always greasy and the coffee tasted like utter crap. But beggars couldn’t be choosers, he supposed. And much less when they were eating on some poor schmuck’s money, whatever Katie said about his hands.

“Look, when we’re ready to go we have to leave that wallet somewhere they can find it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Katie replied, rolling her eyes. “Boy, you’re not cut-out for this life if you get squeamish about a little stealing.”

“What _life_?” Ben snapped. “I don’t want to be cut-out for any _life_. I want to go back to _my_ life. I want to go to go home and do my laundry and study for my finals and oh, God, I never thought I would say that. I just… I want things to go back to normal.”

Katie and Jack stared at him from across the table. Jack seemed a little sad, as if he pitied Ben, but Katie’s expression was unreadable. She probably thought he was being whiny and a coward, and maybe she was right, but goddammit, if there was a moment for him to whine, this was it.

He wished he hadn’t accepted Gary’s invitation to meet him at the frat house for the party. And that got him thinking about Gary once again. Gary and the way his voice had sounded so unlike him.

“That other angel,” he said. “Manakel. He said that Gary had agreed to be his vessel. What’s that mean?”

“Angels can only remain on the earthly plane if they have a vessel. A human body that they can possess,” Jack explained. “And to possess it, they need the human’s consent.”

“Why the hell would Gary consent to that?”

“I mean, if an angel descended from the heaven and said you were chosen for a divine mission, you would agree, wouldn’t you? Especially if you didn’t know any better,” Katie replied. She drank the coffee in one gulp without flinching even though Ben was pretty sure he hadn’t seen her put any sugar on it. Ben tried to keep his revulsion from showing in his face.

Especially when another terrible idea came to him.

“So, wait… the other girls… Trisha and Lila, they were also possessed?” He leaned back on his seat, a cold sweat forming in his back. “And we killed them?”

That family made Katie’s features soften a little.

“You didn’t kill anybody, Ben.”

“But…”

“It was unlikely that they could have survived either way,” Jack intervened. “Once an angel takes possession of a body, they will stay in it. They can’t be exorcised as if they were a demon or a ghost.”

Ben looked down at the mess of bacon and eggs and pushed them away. He had suddenly lost his appetite.

“So you’re saying there’s no way to rescue Gary from Manakel?”

Jack tilted his head, as if he needed to reflect on that question for a moment.

“The host could potentially expel him, I suppose,” he said in the end. “I’m sure Castiel will know more about it,” he concluded, but he didn’t sound too convinced. Ben had the impression he was just saying that in a vain attempt to console him.

“That’s the dude Claire called,” Ben remembered. “Who is he, again?”

“He’s an angel. But he’s not like the other angels,” Jack added quickly, probably because he saw the way that both Ben and Katie flinched. “He’s on your side. The humans' side, I mean.”

“Is he your dad?” Ben inquired.

Jack opened his mouth, closed it again, and finally straightened his shoulders and stuck up his chin.

“Yes, he is.”

His hesitation indicated that there was more to the story than Jack was letting on, but Ben decided to leave it for now. All the talk about dads was giving him a headache once again. Or perhaps it was that they spent an hour in the back of a pickup truck with the sun beating down on their heads. Or the fact he had been chased out of his house by murderous angels and he was uncertain about his mother’s and his best friend’s fate.

It could’ve been a combination of all three.

“Well, how are you feeling now, cupcake?” Katie asked. “That blasting thing really seemed to have taken a toll on you.”

That was uncharacteristically thoughtful of Katie. Then again, maybe she was one of those people that took a while to warm up to others. Ben might have been misjudging her because it was hard to get to know someone when you have met them the night before and spent the better part of it fighting or fleeing for their lives.

“I’m feeling better already,” Jack assured her and smiled softly. “I think I might be able to transport us now.”

He stretched his hand towards Ben, but Katie quickly grabbed it by the sleeve and pulled it back.

“Wait, wait, wait, hold on! You can’t just make us disappear in the middle of a crowded diner!” she argued. “That might draw some unwanted attention on to us. We need to go somewhere more private.”

“Right, because walking down the streets of Cincinnati with a big ass sword is going to be less conspicuous,” Ben said.

“You’d be surprised the things you can get away with if you say you’re going to a comic convention.” Katie looked around and signaled for a waitress to come to their table. “Excuse me, ma’am. Could you tell us about a nice, cheap motel nearby?”

That was probably the kind of question that sounded incredibly suspicious coming from one girl and two guys having breakfast very early on a Saturday morning, but the waitress made no comment on it. She was even kind enough to draw them a map on a napkin.

And Katie was right: whenever someone turned to look at them on the street, she loudly started talking about how excited she was to put on her cosplay and get her copy of _Sandman_ signed. Onlookers quickly stopped paying attention to them once they overheard her.

The motel was only three blocks away and the guy sitting at the counter apparently couldn’t be bothered to give a fuck why the needed a room for the day. Katie paid with one of the credit cards she extracted from the stolen wallet (Ben tried really hard to ignore the guilt in the pit of his stomach by telling himself they had bigger troubles) and guided them upstairs to the small room with two queen beds they had rented.

“Alright,” Katie said, closing the door behind them. “Do you mind if I go freshen up a bit before we fly away or whatever is it that angel boy here will have us do?”

“Really?” Ben asked, arching an eyebrow. A few hours later she was the one who said they were in a time-constraint situation, and now she wanted to take a moment to do her hair and make-up?

“I drank a lot of coffee,” Katie explained, handing Ben the sword. “And also, you know… Sam and Dean Winchester? They’re kind of legends in the hunting community. Wanna make a good first impression.”

Ben was a little surprised that Katie would care for such things, but after a exchanging a look with Jack, he found himself shrugging. They had already stopped for breakfast and the transporting would be an instantaneous thing, so it didn’t matter if they took two extra minutes.

“Girls, am I right?” he commented after Katie disappeared inside the bathroom. He rested the sword against the foot of one of the beds. It was incredibly heavy and he wondered how Katie could carry it all this time.

“I think she might have the right idea,” Jack said. “For humans, teleporting can have some strange effects on their digestive systems.” He lowered his voice an octave. “You may get… constipated.”

Ben stared silently at him, trying to determine if he was joking or not.

“You’re one weird dude, Jack.”

“Thank you,” Jack muttered, but he didn’t sound as if he was sure what Ben said was a compliment.

“I like you,” Ben continued. “Maybe when all this bullshit is over, we can be friends or something. Go for beers.”

“I thought you wanted to go back to your normal life.”

Ben rubbed the back of his neck. He didn’t want to admit out loud that he was slowly starting to come to the realization that, even if he somehow managed to survive whatever the angels wanted to do to him, things wouldn’t go back to normal. Not anymore. Not just like that.

“Yeah, well. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

That startled Jack for some reason.

“What did you say?”

“The bridge thing? It’s just an expression,” Ben said, shrugging. “I don’t know where I picked it up, but you know. It’s useful.”

Jack glanced at him, his mouth slightly opened. After a few seconds, it turned a little uncomfortable.

“Something you want to tell me, bud?”

“Yes.” Jack stepped forward, straightening his shoulders once more as if he’d just made a decision. “You should know this, before we get there. Your father…”

There was a booming sound and a flash of light, as if a lightning had stricken right in the middle of the room. Ban cried out in shock and jumped back, covering his eyes. When he looked again, Jack was nowhere to be seen.

“What the…?”

The bathroom’s door slung open and Katie came out. She held a towel to her arm that was rapidly staining red. Behind her, Ben could see the sigil drawn hastily in the mirror, the blood fresh and dripping down on the sink.

She looked around the room with wide eyes. She seemed surprised, as if she hadn’t been sure that what she did was going to work. Then, slowly, she smiled, and turned her gaze towards Ben.

“Well,” she said. “Alone at last.”


	5. Chapter 5

There were a couple of reasons Ben could think of regarding why Katie would want Jack out of the picture. None of them where good news for him.

He stepped away from her, his eyes fixed on her posture. She seemed extremely relaxed, but at the same time, that could have been just a façade. Like when she had convinced the driver to take them to the city and then stolen his wallet. Except this was much more dangerous, because they were alone in a motel room where nobody would hear him scream and the people looking for him (if someone was still looking for him) were too far away to call them for help.

And he had left the sword next to her, like an idiot.

“Why did you do that?” he asked, turning away from her. He could escape through the window. They were on the second floor, but if he jumped…

“Ben, calm down.”

“I am calm,” Ben replied, inching towards the window. “Why would you say I’m not calm? Just because you blasted away the guy who was trying to get us away from the angels?”

“It had to be done,” Katie said, matter-of-factly. “He was a nephilim. For all we know, all the bullshit about taking us to the Winchesters could have been just that. Bullshit.”

“What are you talking about? He healed us! He killed that other angel that was attacking us in my mom’s house!”

“Yeah, and maybe he did that so we would let our guard down!” Katie reasoned. “The angels want you alive, Ben, so of course it would be much easier to get you to go with them willingly.”

“And we shouldn’t have trusted Jack?”

“No. If it isn’t human, you can’t trust it.”

“He _was_ human!” Ben replied. “Part human, at least.”

“Not human enough for my liking,” Katie determined. “Stop, Ben. You’re not gonna jump out of the window.”

Ben looked down at his hand; that had been toying with the latch while he argued with Katie. She was probably right. If he jumped down, all he was going to get was a broken foot. On top of it, he would be leaving behind the only weapon he had to defend himself if more angels came looking for him. Not that he would be capable of stabbing one, but at least it would make him feel better.

He looked at the hunter with open irritation.

“Well, then, what exactly do you suggest we do now?”

“We’re gonna have to take a car,” Katie said, still speaking as if it was the only logical option.

“You mean breaking into a car and hot-wiring it?” Ben let out a bitter laugh. “No. Fuck no.”

“Ben…” Katie started, in a tone of voice that slightly reminded him of a teacher about to tell him to stop interrupting the class.

“I don’t care, okay? We’re not doing that!”

“Oh, my God, you’re insufferable!” Katie exclaimed, frustrated. “I’m trying to keep you alive here, dammit!”

“Why?” Ben shot back. “Why do you care? Why did you even come looking for me?”

“Because you’re my best friend!”

The claim was sudden and strange enough that it rendered Ben speechless. Katie looked more furious than ever before, but there was also something softer behind her eyes. As if she was trying to hold back tears.

“You’re my best friend,” she repeated, lowering her voice. “And you don’t even remember me.”

She crossed her arms and turned her back on him, stepping away as if it was too painful to even stand near him. Ben took a moment to try to collect his thoughts before he approached her.

“Katie, I’m sorry. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Katie scoffed, but instead of storming out or screaming at him again, she moved her hair to the side.

“I’m talking about this.”

Even at that distance, the scar was visible. It rested over her back, right on the spot where her shoulder became her neck, perfectly round and sunken underneath her skin. Ben took a step closer, both fascinated and horrified.

It looked like a bite mark, made by a row of sharp, small teeth, like those of a shark. And it was old enough to be slightly faded.

“When we were children, there was a changeling in our neighborhood,” Katie told him. “She… it took several children away and replaced them with its own. Changeling children feed on the mothers and kill anyone who comes in between them and their snack.” She stopped, swallowed hard and slowly turned to face Ben again. “The mother feeds on the children it takes.”

She took a few steps to lean against the wall, as if the weight of telling him that story was too much for her to stand up straight.

“I was the first kid it kidnapped,” she continued. “It killed my dad and her offspring terrorized my mom. For weeks. Meanwhile I was trapped in a cage in a dirty basement and I saw how everyone I knew from the block was snatched as well. And then you were too.”

Ben shook his head. Katie’s words fell like hammers in his ears. His brain was buzzing, like it did when he had a migraine coming on. He opened and closed his eyes several times, trying to take in what she was revealing.

“What happened?”

“Hunters rescued us. They killed the mother and they took us home,” Katie told him. She let out a chuckle. “Happy ending, right? Except now all of us knew about the monsters. But no one wanted to talk about it, no one wanted to try to understand what had happened. They forgot. Repressing memories is easy when you’re a kid, but I was there the longest. I couldn’t forget. All the others bullied me and told me I was crazy. I knew it was because it made them uncomfortable that I wouldn’t go along with pretending nothing had happened, but sometimes I also believed that I was crazy.” Her voice broke slightly as she kept talking. She took a deep breath and raised her gaze. Her dark brown eyes pierced right through him. “All of them avoided me, except you.”

Ben said nothing. There was nothing he could say, because he didn’t remember any of the things Katie was saying. He was trying, so hard, to try to picture it, but the more he tried, the worse his migraine became.

“Katie…”

“You were always telling me that what’d happened was real,” she told him. “That I had nothing to be afraid of, because there were heroes out there fighting those monsters.”

She stopped and made a sound that was somewhere between a chuckle and a scoff. As if she couldn’t decide what Ben had said was funny or just incredibly naïve.

“You helped me so much those days,” she continued. “Just by being there, just by telling me that I hadn’t imagined it all. I never told you this, but my mom… she never looked at me the same way again. It was as if sometimes she doubted if I was really me or if the changeling had come back. She…”

She interrupted herself again and wiped the tears that had been pooling in her eyes. Ben was going to tell her that she didn’t need to say anymore, not if she didn’t want to, not if it caused her pain, but Katie continued despite how obviously she didn’t want to revisit all those memories.

“She sent me away after you and your mom moved. She sent me to a mental ward for teenagers, because I wouldn’t stop talking about the changelings. I wouldn’t stop reading the signs of supernatural things in the news or… they tried to convince me I was making it all up to cope with the childhood trauma of being kidnapped and losing my dad.” She let out a bitter laugh. “And all the time I was there, all I could think about was how I was going to get out of there and find you again.” She sighed. “But you forgot. Not just about the changelings, but about _me_.”

Ben understood now. Her anger, her bravado, the way she had acted towards him since the beginning. She must have felt like he had betrayed her by forgetting. Hell, after everything that she’d been through, he’d be furious with himself too.

And yet…

“I’m sorry,” he said. He rubbed his right temple, as if that would make his headache subside. “I’m really sorry, Katie. I wish I could remember anything of what you’re telling me.”

Katie frowned at him and once again wiped her face quickly. Her voice had recovered her confident, matter-of-factly tone when she spoke again:

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Ben said. “It’s just… migraines. I’ve been having them for years.”

Katie tilted her head, her eyes becoming more curious as she stepped closer to him. She raised her hand and she too pressed against his skull.

“Since when?”

“Since my mom and I were in this accident when I was thirteen… why is that important?” he asked. He was a little confused. They had been talking about Katie and her tragic backstory; his migraine didn’t factor into that at all.

Katie seemed to realize the same thing, because she stepped back.

“I don’t know. It probably isn’t.” She bit the inside of her cheek and immediately changed the topic. “Well, since I sent away angel boy… which I’m still convinced was the right to do–” she added when she Ben open his mouth to protest, “–we’re gonna have to try and get to the Winchesters by ourselves.”

“Okay.” Ben sighed. The moment had passed as suddenly as it began and now Katie the single-minded hunter was back. “How do you propose we do that? And please don’t say ‘stealing a car’.”

Kate huffed, as if Ben had just shot down the only idea she had. She paced around the room for a couple of seconds and finally stopped, with her arms crossed over her chest.

“I’m open to suggestions.”

Ben took a moment to gather up as much patience as he was going to need by staring up at the ceiling.

“You really didn’t think this through, did you?”

Katie glanced away.

“Do you even know how we’re supposed to get to these guys?” Ben insisted.

“Do you?” she replied.

Ben rubbed his face. The only solution he could think of was that they laid low for a couple of hours until Jack could come back from where it was that the blast had send him. But he knew that would give Manakel plenty of time to catch up with them and besides, Katie would never accept it.

He stared out at the busy street for a moment or two, toying with the contents of his pocket: his wallet, his coins…

His fingers brushed against something squared and memories of the night before came rushing back to his mind. He took out the paper and slowly unfolded it.

“Actually,” he said. “I think I might.”

According to Google maps, the coordinates that Claire had given them were that of a small town in the middle of Kansas by the name of Lebanon. Or rather, right outside of it in a woody area with apparently nothing else for miles around, except an abadoned facotry and the Geographic Center of the United States.

“Great. We can snatch a picture when we get there.”

The librarian, who was watching them use the computer, hushed them. Ben didn’t realize he had been talking so loudly, or maybe it had sounded that way because they were literally the only people in there that Saturday.

Katie downloaded the maps and sent them to print. She had lost her cellphone at some point in the scuffle against Sorath, and Ben had left his charging in his mom’s living room. This was one thing he regretted the most. If he’d known he was going to be blasted off one state away, he would have put it in his pocket. That way he could have known where his mother was and if she was okay and…

“Hey.” Katie touched his arm and pointed at the screen. She had opened the secret hunters’ blog. There was a post from MotorcycleBarbie98 from four hours before.

_Had some difficulty with the mission, but we’re unharmed. Currently heading to Lebanon with a civie on tow; expecting to arrive Saturday night or Sunday morning. Might take some time before I can go back to SD. Will call you when I’m safe with friends. If there are news about Right_to_Rock or the BB Subject, let me know right away._

“Right to Rock?” Ben repeated, frowning.

“That’s me,” Katie said. Her cheeks turned pink, but she refused to look at Ben. “You know, because of Keel. As in, Katie Keel.”

“Oh.” Ben tilted his head, unable to keep from smiling. “That’s… cool.”

Katie elbowed him in the ribs and when Ben groaned in pain, the librarian shushed them again. Ben wanted to explain that he had meant that with complete sincerity, but Katie was already typing away in the computer.

“What are you doing?”

“Letting them know we’re alive,” Katie explained. “Claire says she has a civie with her. A civilian,” she elaborated to ease Ben’s confusion. “Someone who’s not in the life. I’m guessing that must be your mom.”

Ben breathed out in relief, as if an enormous weight had been lifted of his shoulders. His mom was alive. She was safe with Claire. He was going to see her again when they met up in the safe place. Perhaps there was a way out of this mess after all. He leaned back on the chair. He had been raised an atheist, but at that moment, he really felt like saying a little prayer in thanks…

Another comment appeared underneath Claire’s post. It was a picture of unintelligible symbols in a row with a simple but urging message: _GET INKED ASAP._ The sender was PatientClairvoyant.

Patience. Claire’s psychic friend.

“What’s that?” Ben asked, as Katie sent it to print once again.

“I don’t know, dude, I can’t read Enochian. Hell, I can barely pronounce some of the Latin exorcisms for demons,” she admitted with a shrug. “I’m guessing it’s some sort of protection spell so the angels can’t track us. Should have thought about that as soon as I knew what we were dealing with.”

“So I’m supposed to get a tattoo? Like the one you have in your back?”

Katie arched an eyebrow at him and Ben immediately regretted lowkey admitting that he had been looking at her back.

“Guess we’re gonna have to do one other thing before we leave,” she said, typing the words ‘tattoo parlor’ in the maps.

Ben cringed, already knowing they were gonna have to pay for it with the credit card they ( _Katie_ ) had stolen from the truck driver.

 

* * *

 

The first two parlors turned them down because they didn’t receive walk-ins and the third, because they couldn’t provide an ID indicating that they were indeed above the age of eighteen. The fourth one looked far darker, emptier and didn’t ask for any sort of identification, only if they were paying cash or credit.

Ben was pretty sure that if the angels didn’t kill him, the septicemia would. At least the guy and the girl who ran the store had the decency to wear gloves and open a package of new needles right in front of them.

“You said this is a love spell? That’s so romantic!” the girl commented. She had a pink Mohawk and a nose ring, that contradicted her cheerful tone of voice.

“Isn’t it?” Katie replied. He was once again doing her normal, excited voice and it was a little disturbing just how she could switch it like that. She extended her hand across the small space that separated the chairs where they were reclined with their shirts rolled up. “We never want to be apart. Isn’t that right, baby?”

Ben shuddered at the cold stencil against his abdomen. The spell was long and needed some place to stretch, so the tattoo artists had suggested the best place to do it was right underneath his pectorals. Katie had chosen the same place to maintain their cover that they were just a young couple getting matching tattoos to express their love.

He was having much trouble concentrating in his acting when the artists kept buzzing their little sharp torture devices.

“Yeah… of course… baby.”

It came out so awkwardly that he was pretty sure nobody believe it. The dude (with blue hair and many piercings in his ear) threw him a pitiful look.

“Sure you want to do this?”

“Of course he wants to do it!” Katie exclaimed. “Why wouldn’t he? And make sure the symbols are all in place, because we don’t want the spell to be messed up.”

Ben took a deep breath and turned to his tattoo artist.

“Let’s just… get it over with.”

The guy with blue hair merely shrugged and got to work.

Ben would've liked to say that he handled it like a champ and didn’t even blink as the needle hit his skin over and over again, like nails scratching painfully over the same spot. But the truth was that he found himself squeezing Katie’s hand tight and gritting his teeth to prevent himself from screaming. At one point, he even had to ask the dude to stop because the entire parlor was spinning around and he could feel the greasy Biggerson breakfast climbing up to his throat.

Katie, on her part, managed the entire process with aplomb without breaking character of the sweet girlfriend even once. She patted his hand and asked the artists to bring Ben a soda so he could recover a little from his nausea.

“It’ll be over soon, babe,” she told him. “You only have two more lines to go! You’re doing great!”

The blue-haired guy had a different opinion.

“Look, man, if you want to come back tomorrow…”

“We won’t be in town tomorrow,” Katie cut him off. “We need to get these done today.”

She was right, of course. Ben took a deep breath and leaned back down on the armchair, closing his eyes and trying to imagine he was somewhere far away, possibly sunny and with pretty girls in bikinis.

“Let’s keep going.”

He wasn’t sure how effective his mental vacation was, but just when he was thinking that it would never end, the blue-haired guy announced he was done. Ben and Katie stood in front of their full-sized mirror, admiring the work. Katie compared them closely to the page they had printed in the library and then smiled approvingly.

“It’s perfect!” she exclaimed and threw her hands around Ben’s neck. “I’m so happy we did this!”

She left a quick peck on his lips.

Ben was tired as hell, still a little dizzy and with the entire left side of his body aching. Yet, somehow, the surprise at Katie’s reaction made all of that disappeared for a few seconds, if only while he wondered what the hell had that been.

By the time he managed to gather his wits, the artists had already bandaged their tats and Katie was paying (it was a miracle the card hadn’t been cancelled yet) and grabbing him by the hand again to leave the parlor.

“Alright. Next step: get some transportation,” she announced.

Ben felt like he was walking three steps behind her, and not just because she strode away without waiting for him. It was as if all of this, going somewhere, acting like someone completely different, getting what she wanted and then leaving without another thought was just par of the course for her. She didn’t have a second to hesitate or to explain her actions to anybody else. And the fact that she had stopped to do so for Ben back in the motel…

Katie spotted a car parked in a relatively empty corner and leaned down to take what seemed to him like an oversized nail file out of her boot.

“Cover me,” she said.

“Really?” Ben sighed, but all he could was stand around, hoping his body would cover what Katie trying to manipulate the car’s door. “You have your car stealing kit with you, but you couldn’t store something more useful, like a cellphone?”

“Hey, stop it with your moral complaints,” she told him and even though he couldn’t see her face, he was completely sure she was rolling her eyes at him. “Preventing the end of the world is worth a stolen car.”

“Okay, first of all, you were already planning on stealing a car before I told you what Claire said. Second…”

Ben’s voice trailed off. A man that looked vaguely familiar had just appeared around the corner. He stopped, his eyes growing wide as he spotted Ben and suddenly, it made sense why the credit card hadn’t been cancelled.

Apparently, the truck driver had nothing better to do that day than to track them down.

He spun on his heels and disappeared around the same corner.

“Katie…” Ben said.

“I’m almost done,” Katie replied. A second later, the car’s door clicked open and Katie stood up straight with a smile on her lips. “Get in.”

Ben’s heart pounded fast as he obeyed her and Katie leaned down underneath the wheel. He supposed he shouldn’t be afraid of humans, not when had found out there were much more powerful more terrible things roaming the earth.

He still felt his breath caught in his throat the second the trucker driver came back followed by two cops and pointed directly at them.

“Katie!” he called again.

“Almost done!” Katie repeated, as she quickly manipulated the cables. The two cops stepped in their direction…

The engine roared to life and Katie let out a satisfied chuckle. Ben immediately reached for the seat belt, but he didn’t get to strap it before Katie stomped on the accelerator.

The cops screamed something at them and reached for their guns, but Katie spun the wheel and sped down a random street. Tires screeching and honking accompanied them when they crossed a red light. Katie burst into laughter.

“Not bad, huh? I think I broke my own record!”

Ben thought about telling her he really would’ve rather taken his chances with the angels if he’d known this was how she drove. But the fact his heart was beating in his throat and his balls had suddenly retreated into his body prevented him from forming coherent sentences for a while.


	6. Chapter 6

Ben wasn’t sure whether to call it luck or not, but somehow they didn’t end up being chased by cops into a barricade or having to drive off cliff while holding hands. He might have been exaggerating, but he was at least ninety percent sure that Katie was entirely capable of driving the car off a cliff. Perhaps if they had stolen something more valuable than a wallet and a random car, the cops would’ve thought they were worthy of a chase.

It was an old model after all, she explained; that was why it had been so easy to get into and to get started. Ben didn’t feel comfortable thinking they had taken some poor uninsured schmuck’s method of transportation, so he changed the topic.

“Where did you learn to steal cars?”

“After I escaped from the ward, I spent some time living in Chicago. I learned to survive on my own,” Katie explained. Her face grew a bit somber. “Of course I had to leave fast when I got caught so they wouldn’t hand me back to my mom.”

She talked as if she had been very young when that happened. Ben shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“Look, I try to rent cars whenever it’s possible,” Katie said, interpreting Ben’s reaction as contempt for her open disregard towards private property. “It’s more inconspicuous anyway.”

“Have you thought about getting your own car?”

“Right. Because banks are totally gonna give a credit to the homeless runaway girl who hunts monsters and cheats at poker for a living.”

Strangely, she sounded considerably less bitter when talking about than she did about anything else. As if cheating at poker and hunting monsters was what made her happy.

“You don’t have to go to a bank. There’s plenty of people who sell second-hand cars for cold hard cash.”

“Yeah… I’m not exactly rolling in the dough here,” Katie pointed out.

There was no arguing with that, so Ben let the conversation die for a while. But looking at the rolling fields and the apparently endless road ahead of them gave too much time to think: about the angels, about his mom, about the thing about his father that Jack been trying to tell him…

The migraine returned. At this point, it was as if a particular angry dwarf was dancing an Irish jig inside his head and it was definitely not fun.

“Are you okay?” Katie asked when she noticed that he was rubbing his temples. “Is it the migraines again?”

“Yeah,” Ben muttered, squinting his eyes at the sun pouring in through the window. “I don’t know what’s going on. They usually just go away after a couple of hours, but nothing’s happening now.”

Katie glanced at him, but she quickly turned her eyes to the road again.

“We’ll stop in the next gas station to fill the tank and buy something to eat. I’m sure they’ll have something to help out with it and you’ll feel better afterwards.”

“I’m not so sure,” Ben replied. “I think I might need to consider that it is stressed-related this time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I don’t know if you noticed this, but ever since you walked into my life… since you walked _back_ into my life,” he corrected himself. “I’ve been trapped in a whirlwind of mortal danger and morally questionable decisions. And it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours yet.”

He fully expected Katie to scoff at him and tell him to shut up or that he was dumb for thinking she was the cause of all of his troubles. Instead, she chuckled. It was a soft, quick sound and he almost could believe he’d imagined it if it wasn’t because of what she added next:

“That’s just me. Here to drag you from your comfortable life back into the fray.”

Ben thought about saying he didn’t feel like he was being dragged back into anything, but he opted to keep his mouth shut. He found he liked Katie a lot better when they were in agreement over something.

 

* * *

 

They found a gas station right before dusk and weren’t surprised when Pickup Truck Guy’s card was declined. They had to pay for everything with the petty change Katie had managed to scrap from his wallet, plus some gas money they found searching around the stolen car. They left out his aspirins, but his migraine had receded since the afternoon. Ben tried not to think about it too much as they returned with some sandwiches, nachos and several energy drinks to the car.

“You always eat like this?” Ben asked, a little disgusted as Katie shoved a handful of nachos into her mouth.

“What’s _wong_ with it?” she asked, chewing with complete disregard.

“Your body isn’t getting any nutrients from it!” Ben explained.

“It’s cheap.”

“Yeah, but it’s gonna make you sick in the long run. Especially if you burn down calories fighting monsters and running from the law. You need to have a good balanced diet to have enough energy…”

Katie threw her head back and laughed.

“Okay, Dr. Braeden,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “Do you mind opening that can for me?”

Ben bit the inside of his cheek and handed it to her. He didn’t know why it irked him so much that Katie called him that. Perhaps because it was a reminder of the life that he might not be able to go back to. He leaned back on his seat and stared at the ceiling.

“Hey, Katie. What are you gonna do once all of this is over?”

“Move on to the next case, I guess.”

“Just like that?”

“What else could I do?”

Ben didn’t know the answer to that, so he stayed quiet, with his eyes fixed on the road. His eyelids felt extremely heavy and his entire body ached, as if suddenly all the exhaustion of the day had fallen on him as the sun disappeared in the horizon and now he just needed to…

He woke up with a gasp when the car gave a small jump.

“What was that?” he asked.

“I don’t know. It was too small to be a deer. A fox maybe?” Katie replied, without even looking at him.

Ben looked outside. The night had fallen completely now, but the sky… the sky was illuminated with thousands, _millions_ of stars. They twinkled like the tiniest shards of glass, infinite and unfathomable. Between them, the biggest moon he’d ever seen shone bright and silver, as if she was trucking along with them down the road.

He stared at it open-mouthed for a moment before he realized exactly what that meant.

There was no light pollution. There wasn’t a town or a city or maybe even a random farm in seemingly miles and miles around.

“Where are we?”

“Not sure. Somewhere in Missouri, I think.”

Ben rubbed his eyes and that was when he noticed something else: the needle that indicated the speed was practically turned all the way to the right.

“What the… slow down!”

“Ben, come on, there’s literally no one else in this road!” Katie argued. “And we’ve lost enough time as it is.”

“If we crash against something, we’re going to lose even more time! And…” He looked down for a moment and discovered horrified the cans of energy drink were rolling empty in the car’s floor. “Did you drink them all? How are you not having a heart attack?”

“Well, I don’t know. I just took a sip every time I felt like my eyes were beginning to close.”

“Holy shit. Stop the car!”

“No.” Katie shook her head. “We have to get you to Lebanon!”

“We’re not gonna get to Lebanon if we die!”

“Oh, my God, stop exaggerating. We’re not going to…”

A large shadow crossed the road. The lights hit a pair of green bright eyes staring right back at them as they approached it rapidly.

“Watch out!” Ben screamed as Katie brusquely turned the wheel. The car spun on itself a couple of times and Ben wished he could say he didn’t scream the entire time.

Maybe he didn’t, if only because it felt like his lungs were about to collapse on themselves and his heart was once again nowhere near his chest.

Katie let the car roll on the side of the road until it stopped by itself.

“Okay. That one was definitely a deer,” she admitted.

Ben leaned his head against the dashboard, taking in deep breaths to make sure he didn’t vomit the sandwiches he had ate… five, six hours ago? It was impossible to tell.

Katie’s hand came to rest on his back.

“Hey, Ben. Are you okay?”

Ben slowly raised his eyes at her.

“No! Hell, no! I am so far from okay it’s not even funny!” he exploded. “The angels might be the Terminator, but it’s not worth you killing yourself to try and save me from them, Kyle!”

Katie looked at him stunned, and for once she struggled to come back with something witty.

“Well… I just…”

“I am aware of how dangerous everything is and that the situation is urgent,” Ben cut her off. “I know, okay? You don’t have to tell me. It’s my life that has been fucked beyond repair by things I didn’t even know existed yesterday. But Katie, for the love of God, I want you to survive this too!”

Katie opened her mouth. Then she closed it again. Ben supposed he must have made his point clear enough to render her speechless, so before she could recover, he unbuckled his seatbelt and opened the door.

“What are you doing?” she asked as Ben walked a few steps away from the car.

It wasn’t easy. His legs felt like jelly and his head was dizzy, but he managed. The silence of the night enveloped him like a blanket, and he found it… unsettling. He was used to listening to cars running down the street, or people shouting with frustration, or Gary doing the do with a girl in the next room over. It felt unnatural that the night was so quiet. There could be anything waiting for him in the shadows the moon couldn’t dispel.

Which is why it was a bit of relief when Katie existed the car and came after him.

“What exactly are you trying to accomplish here?”

Ben turned to her with his arms crossed over his chest. She looked like a dark silhouette standing against the lights of the car.

“I’m not going back in until you agree to stop for a few hours so we can sleep,” he determined. “And tomorrow we’re taking turns behind the wheel.”

“Are you serious right now?”

“Do I look like I’m joking to you?”

Katie pinched the bridge of her nose in frustration.

“Ben, do you have any idea how many things can go wrong if we just stop?”

“I can think up of a few scenarios, yes,” he admitted. “They’re not as bad as us swerving off the road, crashing on a tree and getting ourselves killed because you’re running on three hours of sleep and energy drinks.”

Katie huffed, clearly not pleased, but Ben remained stubborn, his arms crossed over his chest and staring her down. She looked away first.

“Fine,” she agreed. “We’ll rest in turns. You’re taking the first shift.”

Ben still didn’t climb back in the car until Katie open the backseat door. She pushed her jacket (in which Claire’s angel-killing sword was wrapped) unto the floor and got inside. By the time Ben positioned himself behind the driver’s seat (because he didn’t trust that Katie wouldn’t try to start driving again the minute he fell asleep), she had curled herself up in a ball, with her back turned to him.

An awkward silence fell inside the car. Ben fidgeted with his fingers for a moment. It was odd. Until he was literally lost in the middle of nowhere, with mortal danger in his tail, he never realized how much of an automatic gesture it would’ve been to take out his phone and check in on his messages or just find something on the Internet to distract himself with. Now he was missing it for several other reason: he had pictures of his mom there, pictures of Gary, pictures from all his friends and acquaintances from college. He wondered how they were, what would they think about their sudden disappearance. He wondered what would happen with Trisha and Lila’s families now that they were dead, and if they would think he…

“Stop that.”

Katie’s voice was sharp and it made Ben realize just how much he had been shifting on his seat and tapping his fingers on the wheel.

“Sorry.”

Katie sighed and turned to lie on his back.

“It’s gonna be okay, Ben,” she told him. “The Winchesters are going to find some way to keep the angels away from you and your mom. Don’t worry.”

Ben breathed in deeply. It was nice to hear those words coming from her, and yet…

“Do you really believe that or are you just saying it to make me feel better?” he asked her. “Because correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t strike me as the optimist kind.”

Katie chuckled. It was the first time Ben heard her laugh, genuinely laugh and not just pretend to do so for the benefit of whoever she was trying to cajole or cheat out of their wallets.

“You want honesty?” She spun so that her face, round and pale as the moon appeared on the rearview mirror. “I am way out of my depth here. I deal with a couple of salt-and-burns a month, maybe a flesh eating monster of some kind. The most dangerous thing I’ve ever hunted was a low level black-eyed demon that was possessing a teenage boy because he was stupid enough to try some old sorcery books he found in the attic. This shit? I heard stories from other hunters… they’re not pretty. And I’m really glad we’re going to see someone who knows what to do, because… after the things we’ve seen them do? I’m a little bit terrified.”

Ben supposed that should have made him terrified as well, the fact that the person who supposedly knew how to handle all of this was just tumbling along until someone else help them figure out what to do. But he was quickly finding out there was a threshold for how much fear a person could feel and he was pretty sure he had left it three states behind. So instead, he felt relieved to see the Katie he had met in the hotel room, the Katie that acted like a human being and had normal human being reactions instead of jumping into action headfirst without a second thought.

“Did you know there were angels involved when Patience and Claire posted my name?”

“Yes,” Katie admitted. “They sort of implied it.”

“And yet you came to help me.” Ben cringed. “And I couldn’t remember who you were. Shit, no wonder you were so angry with me. I feel like a total jerk.”

Katie was silent for a few seconds.

“You’re way too trusting,” she scoffed in the end. “I could be lying about being your childhood friend, you know?”

“I don’t think you are,” Ben said. He closed his eyes and ignored the dull ache that returned to his brain. “Not about this.”

Silence fell again between them. Katie turned around to face the car’s ceiling. Clearly, despite Ben’s insistence, none of them were sleeping that night, so he felt he needed to keep the conversation going.

“What the fuck is a salt-and-burn? Is it an omelet?”

Katie chuckled again. Ben was starting to find out that he really liked that sound.

“To get rid of a restless spirit, you salt the bones and burn them,” she explained. “Sometimes it’s easy: you go to their graves and dig them up. But sometimes they’re latching on a personal object or a person they loved. Some of them have been dead for centuries, so tracking their belongings is a pain in the ass and obviously, you can’t burn a whole damn person. So you have to figure out some other way to convince them to move on. There are different kinds of spirits, too. You have death echoes that are trapped on a loop, relieving over and over the moment they died. And then you have the vengeful ones, people who were not that good when they were alive and now they died they sort of want to keep killing and hurting people. Or maybe they were good, but being trapped in a world they don’t belong to anymore slowly drives them into violence. Those are the ones to watch out for.”

“Okay,” Ben muttered. That sounded like a lot of nightmare fuel, but again, he was incapable of feeling fear anymore, so he just found it all fascinating. How did Katie find out about these cases? How did she track down their graves and belongings? Where did the spirits go once they were released? But instead of poking her with all his doubts, he changed into another topic: “And what about the flesh eating monsters? How do you deal with those?”

“Depends. Silver works on most of them. Some you have to get a special sort of wood or amulet. Vampires are the easiest; you just have to chop off their head.”

“What? No wooden stakes?”

“This isn’t _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ , Benjamin.”

Ben had to laugh a little bit at that. Of course, he couldn’t expect everything to be exactly as pop culture portrayed it.

“The first time I hunted a vampire, I…” Katie started, but her voice trailed off. Ben watched her through the rearview mirror and notices she was hugging herself.

“What?” he asked. “What happened?”

Katie stay quiet for so long he believed she had changed her mind about telling him this story.

“She was a sadistic bitch,” she said in the end. “She liked to kidnap people and bleed them out for days. Men, women, children… she didn’t care. I found her lair in an abandon house, broke in and fought her. I pinned her down and I didn’t manage a clean cut, so I had to keep chopping and chopping at her neck. It was a mess. Then I get up and right in the next room I see a poor guy tied up to the chair. The thing is, vampires usually have a mate or a nest, a family they sire. They’re not solitary creatures. So before I untied the guy, I had to stop and wonder…”

She made a pause. Ben was tempted to ask _‘Wonder about what?’_ but decided to stay quiet.

“… I had to wonder if she hadn’t turned him,” she finished with a sigh. “He swore up and down that she hadn’t fed him her blood or anything, but like, he’d just seen me kill her and I still had the bloody axe in my hand. He could’ve been saying that to save his neck. So I sat down with him and we waited for the sunrise. He cried the rest of the night and I… I didn’t know what to say to console him.” She stopped to take in a deep, shuddering breath. She wiped her eyes so quickly Ben didn’t have time to tell her she didn’t have to tell him the rest if she didn’t want to. “So eventually the sun comes up. I tore down the wood planks the vampire had used to cover the windows and he didn’t burn, so he was off the hook. I took him home and watched as his wife and kids ran out to hug him.”

“Oh,” Ben sighed, relieved. “Silver lining, I guess.”

“I went back to my motel. I knew I had to get out of town soon. I jumped in the shower to wash off the blood and I just… I broke down crying. And I couldn’t stop for the next two hours.”

Ben could say nothing to that. He couldn’t even imagine what that was like. He thought about turning around and trying to somehow reach Katie’s hand, but then she laughed again. It didn’t sound happy like before.

“You wanna know what the worst part was? A few days later I was browsing Claire’s blog and I found that vampirism can be cured with a potion of sorts if the person turned hadn’t fed yet. And there I had been willing to kill some poor shmuck because I didn’t know there was a way to save him.” She pinched the bridge of her nose, a gesture Ben had learnt meant she was frustrated. “I just charged headfirst and didn’t think of finding everything I could first. How stupid was I?”

Katie puffed, and it was hard to tell if she was laughing or not.

“Anyway… it’s not a glamorous lifestyle.”

“Yeah. I get the picture.” Ben made a pause and added: “I don’t think you’re stupid, by the way. I think you’re very brave. You saved that guy’s life either way.” He thought about it for a second and then said: “If I’d had to do all that, I’d probably still be crying in the shower.”

At least that made her laugh once more.


	7. Chapter 7

“Ben. Ben!”

Someone shook him by the shoulder and Ben groaned.

“What?!”

“Get up, we slept all night!”

Ben opened his eyes. Katie was standing right next to him with the door open. Behind her, there was barely a sliver of golden light glowing in the horizon.

Ben moved his neck to one side and then another. It was stiff and it hurt. In fact, his entire body ached from sleeping while sat upright in the seat.

“Okay,” he muttered. “Just give me five more minutes…”

Katie pinched his ear and twisted it.

“Ouch, ouch, ouch…!”

“No, I’m not giving you five minutes!” she exclaimed while Ben waved his arms and tried to escape her grip. “We’re going. Now.”

“Okay, okay, fine! I’m up!” Ben protested and Katie finally let go. He rubbed his eyes once more and yawned. “Alright, get in.”

Katie raised an eyebrow at him.

“Are you sure you wanna do that?”

“Like I’m letting you drive after the stunt you pulled yesterday,” he replied. “Just get in.”

Katie looked up and down at him and smiled.

“Sure.”

She closed the door and walked around the car to get in the passenger’s seat. Ben looked down at the wheel for an entire minute, wondering where the keys were. It wasn’t until he heard Katie quietly laughing at him that he realized what was going on.

He didn’t know how to hot-wire a car.

“You’re intolerable, you know that? Are you aware that you’re intolerable? You’re the most intolerable person I have ever met in my life…”

Katie, immune to his criticism, only laughed harder with every word he said. She was obviously a morning person.

Ben didn’t feel completely awake until a few hours later when they found another Gas ‘n’ Sip by the road where they could go to the bathroom, have some coffee that tasted like ass but that woke him right up and find out about their exact location. Katie’s assertion that they were in Missouri had been right: according to the gas station clerk, they were only an hour or two away from Jefferson City and if they drove with no breaks, they could probably be in Kansas just past midday.

“Why you wanna go to Kansas, for?” he asked, when they told him where they were going.

“We want to see the geographic center of the United States,” Katie explained in her best _‘I’m a nice, normal girl’_ tone of voice. “You know, we’re taking a long road trip now that our finals are over!”

The Gas ‘n’ Sip employee squinted his eyes at them as if he suspected they weren’t being completely honest, but he shrugged and let them finish their coffee near the end of the counter.

“Heads up, finals season isn’t over yet,” Ben told Katie.

“How was I supposed to know that?” She rolled her eyes and gulped downed the rest of her coffee. “We should make a quick stop on Jefferson City, though. We’re running low on funds and I don’t want us to have to walk all the way up to Kansas ‘cause we couldn’t afford more gas.”

“Oh, no.” Ben cringed. “Katie, please tell me you’re not going to pickpocket some other poor person.”

Katie raised an eyebrow at him.

“Well, we have a sword,” she pointed out. “We could always rob a convenience store.”

“Katie!”

“Look, we don’t have time to go over the ethical implications of robbing one single wallet versus trying to save you and the rest of the world of whatever is it that the angels want you for.” Katie rolled her eyes. “So we’re just going to do what we’ve doing all this time, which is everything that I say. We haven’t done too badly, so far, huh?”

Ben was ready to protest that if she hadn’t blasted Jack away, they wouldn’t have to do this cross-country trip out in the open. But Katie moved away to refill her coffee and maybe shoplift something (he couldn’t be sure at this point), so he didn’t have the chance.

Someone chuckled softly behind him.

“She’s a spitfire, huh?”

Ben swallowed nervously and turned towards the clerk. He was smiling and he seemed just as relaxed and normal as he had been a second before. Ben found that weird. If he had eavesdropped their conversation about robbing and pickpocketing people (and saving the world while doing so), he should be at least a little apprehensive of them, right?

“Ha. Yeah,” Ben said, eyeing him closely. The clerk walked around the counter and walked towards him as Ben was trying to find an excuse: “All that talk about stealing and saving the world? Don’t… don’t pay attention to that, okay? It’s just, uh… it’s a game we’re playing. A sort of scavengers hunt and LARP mix…”

The clerk stopped right in front of him, his smile even creepier and wider than before.

“Oh, it’s alright, boy,” he said, calmly. “You don’t have to lie to me.”

Ben’s stomach became a knot. There was strange, disgusting smell in the air all of the sudden. Like rotten eggs. And for some reason, it seemed like it was emanating from the man.

Every instinct inside of him told him to run.

“Well, okay. I’m just gonna go get my friend and…”

For the second time in as many days, a force stronger than himself lifted him up from the floor and threw him across the air. He crashed against the slushie machines with a gasp of pure pain and collapsed on the floor. Everything was spinning around him, which is why he didn’t manage to get on his feet before the clerk was towering over him, still smiling wide.

“We’ve been looking all over for you, Benjamin Isaac Braeden,” he said as his eyes became wider and darker. So dark, in fact, that it was like staring into lifeless emptiness when he leaned closer to him. The smell of rotten eggs invaded Ben’s nostrils, stronger than before.

“Ben!” Katie screamed somewhere to his left.

The thing (because that wasn’t human anymore, oh, God, what was it? _What was going on?_ ) extended his hand and Katie also flew away with a sharp cry. There was a din of glass shattering and that was enough to get Ben to react from his daze of paralyzed terror and pain.

“Katie!”

He tried to stand up but the clerk was on him, on top of him, straddling him and pinning him to the floor with incredible strength.

“Shame. If I had the time, I would have really taken my time to have fun with you and your hunter friend over there, Benjamin.” He rolled up his sleeves as if he was to start a very difficult task and grin at Ben once more. “But the Big Boss’ instructions were clear. We can’t let the angels get the Sword.”

His hands closed over Ben’s throat, an iron grip that choked him in a matter of seconds. Ben lifted his hands and tried to scratch him, to hit him, to get it off him, but it was like a mosquito biting an ox. The thing that had been the clerk continued his task relentless and cruel. Soon black spots started to appear in front of Ben’s eyes and his lungs felt heavy and empty and keeping his hands up was just too difficult…

Something silver flashed nearby and one of the hands let go of Ben’s neck. Just a little bit, just enough so that he could breathe in for a second or two.

The black-eyed thing grabbed at the blade of the sword that Katie had tried to attack him with, indifferent that it was cutting his skin and that his rotten blood was dripping slowly on the floor. The floor that was covered in shards of glass from the destroyed slushie machines. Hoping the thing wouldn’t realize what he was doing, Ben stretched his hand very slowly towards them…

“Nice try,” the monster congratulated Katie before pulling the sword away and using the pommel to hit her in the stomach, so hard that Katie bent over herself and stumbled backwards, letting go of the only weapon they had. “I’ll deal with you in a moment, little girl,” he said as Katie collapsed on her knees, holding her stomach and gasping for air. “First I gotta finish off your friend here…”

Ben raised his hand and with all the strength he had left, he shoved the shard he’d managed to pick up straight into the creature’s left eye. It cried out in pen and distractedly let go of Ben’s neck. The air filling up his lungs was a blessing he didn’t have to appreciate: he tried to roll over, to get away from the grip of the creature but it grabbed him by the hair and pulled him back.

“Annoying little shit…” it mumbled.

The blood gushed from its injured eye and slid down its cheek like a red tear. Ben instinctively punched its face with his left hand, but it was like hitting a wall. His knuckles cracked and a harsh, acute pain fell went down its arm. The creature looked at him again, its mouth deformed in a furious snarl.

“Are you trying to piss me off, boy?”

“No.” Ben coughed. “I’m trying to distract you.”

It wasn’t graceful and it wasn’t precise. He couldn’t find the hilt, so he ended up grabbing the blade and cutting the palm of his hand. But he still managed to raise and drive the point through the monster’s neck. He was surprised at how easily it cut through the muscle and bones, like sinking a knife through half melted butter.

The thing let out a guttural moan as his veins glowed orange right underneath his skin. It felt to the side, limp and finally dead. Ben pushed his body away and crawled from underneath it, trying not to cut himself in the shards of glass and not to think about what he’d just done.

“Katie,” he called out and coughed some more.

Katie wasn’t far away, sat up against a shelf and still holding on to her stomach. Half of her face was bruised and smeared with blood from an ugly cut in her forehead. Even so she managed to look at him with a smile on her swollen lips.

“Well. Congratulations,” she mumbled. “You killed your first demon.”

Ben barely had time to catch her before her eyes fluttered shut and she slid down to one side.

 

* * *

 

Katie had been absolutely right that Ben would have to cast aside his moral quandaries if he wanted to survive and he wasn’t too proud that he wouldn’t tell her that once they were safely on the road again. But first, there were many things he had to do.

He hanged the “CLOSED” sign at the door and hoped that no traveler was particularly desperate to get some gasoline that day. He then pried the cash register opened with the tip of the sword and took out all the money and changed he found inside it. He calculated it must have been just a couple hundred dollars. He also raided the shelves and fridges for enough food and water that they wouldn’t have to stop to get any more. There was a first aid kit underneath the counter and some off brand aspirins.

It’d have to do.

After a trip to the car to deposit his loot there (trying not to look at the body of the demon, which was still reeking of what he now recognized as sulfur), he leaned against Katie who had recovered her consciousness but still blinked and groaned as if the light was bothering her. Ben suspected she might have a bad concussion and cringed. She could pass out again at any moment if that was the case.

“Katie, listen. I’m gonna help you stand up, okay? You need to stay awake and teach me how to start the car.”

Katie shut her eyes tight and then opened then again. Even the simple act of nodding her head looked like it hurt her badly. When Ben passed an arm around her waist and propped her up, she let out a pained moaned. He realized she was only putting her weight on her right leg, so even without the concussion, she was in no condition to drive.

Not that he was much better. His throat and ribs hurt like hell and the cuts in his hands and arms singed. But he ignored all of that. He had to get them out of there and to safety as soon as it was possible. He opened the passenger seat and gently helped Katie into the car.

“Okay,” he muttered, as he sat behind the wheel. “How do I do this?”

Katie didn’t answer and he had to shake her by the shoulder to wake her up.

“Katie!”

“Okay!” Katie slurred. “You have to pick the cable and like… rub it against the other cable…”

Her vague instructions and Ben’s trembling hands made for a bad combination, but after fifteen minutes, the engine roared to life. Ben breathed out in relief and without much thought, he stepped on the pedal. After a few minutes of panicky driving, when the horrible Gas ‘N’ Sip was but a blur in the rearview mirror, he slowed down. The last thing they needed was to be stopped for driving over the limit in a hot-wired car when both he and Katie looked like they’d just come back from the local Fight Club.

And especially if the cops could be possessed by an angel or a…

“Demon!” Ben exclaimed, as if it only know started to dawn on him what had happened. “That was a demon? Why are demons coming after me now?!”

“Don’t… don’t talk so loud,” Katie groaned, sprawled on the seat as if sitting up straight was too much work. “I don’t know, dude. No one said anything about demons.”

Ben glanced at the sword they had borrowed from Claire. The demon had said something about a sword, could that be what they were referring to? But then why wouldn’t Claire warn them about that? Why had the demon tried to kill him? And, oh, God, had he killed the clerk that it was possessing?

There were too many questions buzzing in his head, but before he could ask another out loud, he looked at Katie and found that she had passed out once more.

 

* * *

 

It was a solitary journey, with Katie slipping in and out of consciousness. Ben avoided the towns and the gas stations as best as he could, snacking on the protein bars and sandwiches that he had raided. He stopped after a while to wash his hands with alcohol from the first aid kid and bandage them and the cut on Katie’s forehead, but other than that, he drove like mad man until he spotted a sign that announced that they’d just crossed Kansas state line. They still had a while to go, but for the first time since the entire ordeal had begun, he was able to breathe with ease.

It didn’t last long, though. He found Lebanon easily, a quaint little town that had apparently never even heard of things such as demons and angels, and he followed the signs that pointed him to the landmark that indicated the geographic center of the United States. But other than that, he had no idea what he was looking for or if he was going in the right direction. Finally, he parked just a little outside of town and searched for the maps they had printed in the library.

Katie was a genius and he made a mental note to tell her that once she had recovered enough to understand what he was saying. She had taken the precaution to mark the coordinates that Claire had given them: he had to take a secondary road through some wooded, desolated area and keep going until he spotted… something. He supposed he would know it when he saw it.

As a matter of fact, it turned not to be that hard. After a few minutes tracking down the dirt road, the trees opened to reveal what seemed to be an abandoned factory that stuck out like a sore thumb in the middle of everything else. Ben stopped the car nearby.

“I’m going to see if I can find Claire or… someone,” he told Katie.

“Yeah, okay,” she mumbled sleepily. “You do that. I think I’m gonna take another nap…”

Ben hesitated for a moment. Katie was in no condition to defend herself if another angel or demon showed up. But then again, he needed to find the help he was looking for, and soon. He exited the car and walked towards the abandoned factory.

If it had been a little darker, he might have missed it. His first thought was that it looked like a hobbit hole, if this particular hobbit had been worried about an oncoming nuclear war. Some rusty steps led down a metal door that was bricked all around it. There was moss growing on the cement around it and wherever it lead (the factory’s basement, maybe?) was probably not a pleasant place.

Still, at this point he literally had nothing to lose.

His knocking echoed around the woods ominously. Nothing happened.

He glanced at the car he left a few steps behind, with Katie’s slumbering figure on the passenger seat. What was he going to do if they weren’t in the right place? Katie was injured badly and she needed a doctor, but would it be safe to take her to a hospital? He had literally killed a guy and robbed a convenience store, not to mention the wallet and the car they had taken in Cincinnati. And the dead girl near his building. So if they started asking too many questions in the hospital and called the cops, he figured it was unlikely that they would believe it had all been done to escape supernatural Terminators.

No. It had to be here. It couldn’t be any other place. He raised his hand to knock again, but before he could, the door creaked on its hinges and swung open.

Ben’s headache returned with a vengeance.

There was a short-haired guy standing in the doorway. He was taller than Ben by just a few inches, wearing worn out jeans and a plaid shirt. He didn’t say anything, just stood there, with his mouth hanging open and his eyes growing wide, as if he was surprised to see him. Ben deduced that living in the factory’s basement, this guy probably didn’t get that many visits.

“Umh… hi,” Ben said. He rubbed his temples but immediately fixed his gaze back on the guy. “This is gonna sound a little crazy, but my friend and I are currently in like, a lot of trouble and we need some help…”

“Ben?” the man interrupted him.

Ben skipped the “How do you know my name?” question and went straight to relief that he didn’t have to keep on talking.

“Yes! Are you the Winchesters? I mean, are you Sam or Dean? Did Claire tell you we were coming? Is this where we were supposed to go?”

The man blinked and clenched his jaw, the shock in his face vanishing. He took a step forwards and raised both his arms, as if he was about to hug him, but at the last second, he just extended his right hand to shake Ben’s.

“I’m Dean Winchester,” he introduced himself. “You’re in the right place, son.”


	8. Chapter 8

"Katie, hey. We're here. We made it."

"Mmmh...? Made it where?"

"With the Winchesters," Ben said, as he lassoed his arm around her waist. "It's gonna be okay."

Katie didn't answer. Her head lolled against Ben's shoulder when he pulled her out of the car and her entire body was like a dead weight against him, her limbs as loose as those of a rag doll. He held on to her the best he could until Dean Winchester came running to help.

"You take right, I take left."

They propped Katie's arms around their shoulders and dragged her towards the basement's door. Ben feared that the three of them would stumble down the stairs, but somehow they managed to cross the hobbit hole's door, into a platform and...

Well, it didn't look like a basement.

It was more like a big library, with high ceilings, the golden light from the lamps hanging down and several shelves lining up against the walls. There were more stairs, but before Ben could wonder how they were going to take Katie down, Dean opened his mouth and screamed:

"Cas! We need some healing here!"

The contrast between him and the second man that showed up was almost comical. Ben couldn't think of a single reason why this guy would be sporting a black suit and blue tie underneath a tanned trench coat in the middle of the spring, but there he was. He sprightly walked up the stairs as Ben gently helped Katie sit down on the first step.

"She has a concussion, and I think she broke her leg," Ben explained. "She's been pretty out of it, so I don't know if she's hurting anywhere else..."

The man in the trench coat ignored him as he leaned down and simply placed his open palm against Katie's forehead. It reminded Ben of when Jack had done the same thing and the effect was similar: the cut in Katie's forehead close and she frowned and rubbed her eyes as if she was just waking up from a long, deep slumber.

"Ben?"

"Hey." Ben smiled at her. "We did it. You did it. We're safe."

Katie looked around, blinking several times as she took in her surroundings.

"This is... not what I was expecting," she muttered.

"Right?" Ben laughed. "It's like stepping into the Twilight Zone. Well, more so than in the last couple of days."

Katie chuckled and Ben helped her to her feet. She had to hang on to the stairs' rail for a moment.

"You alright?"

"Yeah, just... a little dizzy."

"Okay. Take it easy."

Ben grabbed her hand and didn't let go until they were at the bottom of the stairs with Dean and the man dean had called “Cas”. Ben assumed that was short for “Castiel”. The guy couldn’t be anyone but Jack’s dad.

"Do you need healing too?" the angel offered.

"I'm fine," Ben said. "It's just some cuts and bruises. Where's my mom?"

Dean and Cas looked at one another as if they had no idea what Ben was talking about.

"She's not here?" Ben asked, the relief he had felt a second before evaporating like water in a hot summer day.

"In her last message, Claire said she was coming here with Mrs. Braeden," Katie elaborated. "They should've arrived by now."

Ben did not like the sudden panic in Dean's face, even if he got it under control almost immediately and patted him in the shoulder.

"We'll find them," he said simply and pushed Ben and Katie towards the tables in the library. "Don't worry."

There was another guy there, a man even taller than Dean and with longer hair, talking on his cellphone at the other side of the room.

"Yes, Jack, they're here. You don't have to keep looking..."

There was a soft flutter of wings and suddenly Jack appeared right next to them.

"Thank goodness!" he exclaimed and without another word, he enveloped Ben in a hug so tight that if none of his bones were broken before, they probably were now. He stepped back and with a wave of his hand, he healed away all Ben's little aches, except for the big one in his head. "I've been looking all over for you, but then you sort of disappeared from my radar and I didn't know... why did you banish me?"

He spoke so fast it took Ben a second to realize that he was looking directly at Katie. Katie, who could no longer deny the nephilim had been telling the truth when he said he was working with the Winchesters. Katie, who suddenly seemed extremely mortified. She shifted the weight of her body from one foot to the other.

"I... well, I couldn't be sure you were who you said you were," she said.

Ben closed his eyes for a moment.

"You're telling me that if you haven't blasted him away, we would've spared ourselves all of this stupid dangerous road trip?" he said, as he let go of Katie's hand.

"I didn't know!" Katie repeated. "And come on, we got here in one piece, didn't we?"

"You sure you want to go with that? Because that sounds like exactly the opposite of what happened, Katherine!"

His headache pulsated so hard that he flinched. His vision was blurry again and he feared that Jack's healing of his eyes had only been temporary. But when he looked up, the library and all its occupants came into focus again.

And they were all staring at him with worried expressions.

"It's fine," Ben assured them. "It's just... migraines. I get them a lot."

"Yeah?" the tall guy with long hair asked him. "How long have you been having them?"

"I don't know. Seven, eight years?" Ben shrugged. He really didn't see how that was important when his mom and Claire were missing.

"Right." The tall guy threw a look at Dean and then put a hand on Ben's shoulder. “Well, sit down. We have a lot to talk about.”

“I’ll go call Jodie and see if she knows anything about Claire,” Castiel added and disappeared from the room.

Dean hanged back a little as the tall guy guided Ben and Katie to some chairs in front of a table and opened a notebook.

“My name is Sam and you’ve already met my brother,” he said, making a gesture towards Dean. “We’re going to try and help you. Tell us everything that happened.”

There was something very calming about Sam’s demeanor, and so, despite Ben’s worried that Claire and Lisa weren’t there yet, he found himself telling him the full story: the angels that had ambushed him at the party, how Claire and Katie had rescued them, how the blast had sent them away to the other side of the country.

“And then Katie blasted me away again,” Jack said.

“Oh, my God, will you let it go?” Katie groaned, but it was obvious that she was still embarrassed about that mistake.

“It’s okay, Katie,” Sam said. “It was a mistake, but you can’t be blamed for making it. It was a very tense situation and you didn’t know who you could trust.”

Katie folded her arms in front of her chest, but Ben thought he saw her smirk while she looked away, as if she felt validated.

Ben finished the story by telling him about the demon attack at the Gas ‘N’ Sip.

“He mentioned something about a sword and how the angels shouldn’t get it?” Ben told them. “Claire lent us her angel-killing sword. Is it something like that?”

Sam and Dean exchanged a quick look. Ben had noticed they did that a lot and it was like entire conversations went on that no one else was privy to.

“Yeah. Maybe it’s something like that,” Dean said.

Jack moved in his chair and when Ben looked at him, he noticed the nephilim’s shoulders had tensed up. He was frowning a little and looking away, as if he was suddenly very uncomfortable with something.

Ben didn’t have time to wonder why that was, because Castiel returned to the library at that very moment. Dean immediately walked up to him and they exchanged some whispered words that didn’t give Ben the best impression.

“Do you have news about my mom?” he asked, standing up and approaching them quickly.

“Sadly, no,” Castiel said. “Jody hasn’t had any more news from Claire since they left Battle Creek. I’m sorry.”

Ben’s stomach twisted up in a knot. It must have reflected on his face, because Dean stepped to him and clasped both hands on his shoulders.

“Hey, we’re going to find her, okay?” he promised. “Patience is going to do her whole looking into the future thing and as soon as we know where they are, Jack is going to fly them over here. It’s going to be okay.”

“Right. So I just have to like, stand here and not think about the worst case scenario,” Ben said.

“Basically, yes.” Dean nodded. “Let us handle this, kid. You and Katie have been through a lot. You should try and get some rest. Are you hungry?”

As if his words had summoned them, the door atop of the platform opened and two more people walked in: a woman with short blonde hair and a man with grey beard. They were both carrying groceries bags. The woman stopped dead in her tracks when she spotted him.

“Oh,” she muttered. She left the groceries over the nearby table and ran up to Ben. “You’re already here!”

She put her arms around Ben and for the second time, he found himself being awkwardly hugged by someone he’d only just met.

“We’ve been so worried about you since Claire called,” the woman said, stepping away. She put her hands on his face and looked at him closely, as if she was trying to find something in it, smiling wide. Ben stared back at her, confused.

“Uh… I… appreciate that?”

Mary’s smile faltered a little bit as she let go of him.

“Ben, this our mother, Mary,” Dean introduced her.

Someone scoffed behind them.

“No, she’s not,” Katie said, leaning against another table.

“I am, in fact,” Mary replied, lifting up her chin.

Katie blinked and did a double take. Ben couldn’t blame her: Mary definitely did not look old enough to have a son in his… how old was Dean? Thirty-something? Forty? Mary couldn’t be older than fifty, _at the most_.

“Lady, what’s your skin care routine?”

“I’m going to take that as a compliment.” Mary chuckled. “Bobby, Sam, why don’t you come help make dinner in the kitchen?”

It was a little bit early for dinner, but after spending the day running on concern and nutrient bars, Ben had to admit he was a little bit hungry. He would have even volunteered to do something in the kitchen if Dean hadn’t insisted on cracking open a beer and sitting down to talk to him for a while. Everyone else seemed perfectly fine with that, for some reason, and left them alone in the library.

They didn’t talk about the angels or the demons or even Katie, who asked where the bathroom was and disappeared for a while. Just… about Ben himself. He had the impression it was almost like Dean was trying to distract him from all the things that worried him.

It didn’t work at all, but he appreciated the effort.

“So how’s life been treating you, kid?”

“Uh… fine. I mean, before all of this mess.” Ben took a sip from his soda he’d decided to have instead of alcohol. His fucking headache just wouldn’t quit and he didn’t want to risk making it worse. “You know, I always said that cramming for exams felt like dying. But now I think I was being a whiny bitch and would take that over everything else that’s happened this weekend.”

Dean chuckled softly. He seemed like a good guy, and despite having only just met him, Ben found that he felt at ease around him.

“You’re in college, then? What are you studying?”

“Pre-Med. I’m a sophomore.”

“Sophomore,” Dean repeated. He seemed a little shocked at that, for some reason. “Wow. So, you’re gonna be a doctor.”

“Yeah, that’s… that was the plan.”

“No, don’t talk like that.” Dean shook his head. “We might still find a way for you and your mom to be safe from all of this.”

Ben fidgeted with his can of soda for a moment, reflecting on that.

“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know if that’ll make a difference, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“Even if we are safe, now we’ll always know that these things are out there, right? They might even keep coming after me. According to Katie, this is the second time,” Ben explained. “And I mean, look at her. She’s doing all of this because a thing almost ate her when she was a kid and it traumatized her and her mom. And… don’t tell her I said this, but she’s super brave and smart and she still barely survived when that demon got to us. I don’t stand a chance in this world. Unless monsters are going to be impressed by me reciting all the bones in the hand.”

Dean’s lip became one tense line. He slowly placed his beer on top of the table.

“Listen to me. You don’t have to worry about monsters or angels or anything like that, okay? That’s what my brother and I are here for. We fight these things so people like you and your mom can stay safe. We’re gonna solve the mess you’re in right now and we’re going to send you home.” He leaned forwards so his face was closer to Ben’s. “Do you believe me?”

Ben bit the inside of his cheek for a moment.

“Yeah,” he mumbled. “It’s weird. I’ve only just met you, but it’s like… I believe you know what you’re doing.”

Dean nodded solemnly and smiled at him.

“You’re gonna have a great life, Ben. I promise.”

Ben looked at him quizzically, but Mary walked in announcing the dinner would be ready soon and they needed to help set the table, so that was the end of their conversation.

It was nothing extraordinary, just spaghetti and sauce. But after days of greasy Biggerson’s food and fear, it felt like the most amazing dish Ben had ever tasted in his entire life. He was so busy eating, he almost didn’t notice what a strange assortment of people they were.

For starters, some weren’t people at all. Jack ate very little and Castiel ate nothing at all, instead sitting silently in his chair and watching them in silence, sometimes tapping his fingers against his phone that stubbornly refused to ring with news about Claire and Lisa. There were the Winchesters who, as Ben had noticed, continued to have silent conversations with just their eyebrows, and Mary who kept offering him and Katie more food.

And then there was the bearded man, Bobby. He kept drinking his beer in silence and looking at Ben like he was trying to figure something about him, but he didn’t ask anything. In the end, it was Katie who talked to him:

“So are you a Winchester too?”

Bobby snapped out of watching Ben like a hawk and turned his attention to her.

“No. I’m a family friend,” he replied.

“Oh, okay. ‘Cause I was starting to think this was some sort of family business you’re running here.”

Sam almost spat his beer and Dean smiled softly.

“You have no idea, kid.”

The conversation was sparse afterwards, but that was fine by Ben. At some point during the dinner, Castiel’s phone rang and he stood up to take the call elsewhere. Ben put down his fork and waited with bated breath until he came back. The angel shook his head.

“Patience is trying a séance to find some sort of clue of their whereabouts. Charlie is also searching for them.”

“Is she another psychic?” Ben asked.

“She’s a… technologically savvy person.”

“She’s a hacker. She might be able to track the last location of Claire’s cellphone and give us a general area where Jack can start looking,” Sam said. “Maybe we should also call Rowena. She may have a spell that can help us.”

Katie raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. Dean glanced in Ben’s direction and then nodded.

“Whatever works. It’s an all hands on deck situation, Sam.”

“Alright, well…” Mary said, clearly trying to lighten the mood. “Why don’t you go take a shower? We’ll get a couple rooms ready for you so you can rest.”

“I’m not sure I’ll be able to sleep,” Ben said.

“We’ll wake you up as soon as we know something,” Dean promised him.

And really, that was as much as Ben could hope for.

The bunker was really like a hobbit hole: cozier and bigger than he had expected, with halls and doors that he imagined would be easy to get lost into. The water pressure of the shower was amazing. He stood underneath the stream for what felt like hours, just letting the hot water wash away the tiredness and grime on his sore muscles.

The last time he’d showered had been on Friday. He had been so excited to find an excuse to get away from his studies that he had put on his nicest shirts and jeans, ready to impress a girl that turned out to be possessed by an angel. It felt like it had been a lifetime ago.

And he still didn’t know how or if he’d be able to help Gary get de-possessed.

One problem at the time.

He turned off the water and wrapped himself in a towel. Mary had lent him some clean clothes, saying that he was about the same size as Dean, even though to Ben, Dean was taller and more muscular than him. The faded grey shirt fir him well enough, but he had to roll up the jeans a little so he wouldn’t trip unto them. He exited the bathroom with a sigh and headed to the room they had assigned to him…

A hand came to rest on his shoulder and he jumped backwards with a whimper before he realized it was just Katie.

“Holy shit, how are you so sneaky?” he asked her.

“There’s something wrong with this place,” Katie declared.

Ben took a moment to rub his eyes. _Of course_ Katie would mistrust the people who were trying to help them, probably the only people that could.

“Katie, I don’t even…”

“Listen to me. Why would an angel be helping these guys?” she pointed out. “Why would Jack be? They also have a witch on their payroll? And then there’s Mary.”

“What’s wrong with Mary? She seemed nice to me.”

“She either had them when she was a pre-teen or she’s some sort of creature who doesn’t age,” Katie said. “There’s something they’re definitely not telling us.”

“How can you know?”

“Because I overheard them talking about it in the kitchen.”

Ben blinked slowly.

“You mean you were eavesdropping on them when you pretended to go to the bathroom?”

“I got lost. That’s besides the point,” Katie said, crossing her arms defensively. “Mary asked Sam if Dean was going to tell you and Sam said no. Bobby seemed to be of the opinion that they should tell you…”

“Tell me what?”

“I don’t know, and that’s the problem!” she argued. “Whatever it is, it’s some sort of big deal and…”

“So what?” Ben interrupted her, his irritation growing. “What are we going to do about it? Do you want us to get out of here and get on the road? All alone, with no idea where my mom is or how to stop the angels from coming at me? _Again?_ ”

“No, but…”

“I am _exhausted_ ,” he continued, ignoring her protests. “I’m worried sick and my headache has somehow gotten worse since we got here. So for all I care, these guys can have fucking Great Duchess Anastasia prisoner in the basement. As long as they help me and my mom out of this mess, they can keep all of their stupid secrets to themselves!” He stopped to take a breath. He hadn’t realized he had been screaming and just how mad he had grown with every word he spoke.

Katie stared at him, with her mouth hanging open. Her voice was much softer when she spoke again:

“Ben, I’m just trying to help you.”

“I know.” Ben pinched the bridge of his nose. “But I can’t put my mom in danger just because you’re psychologically unable to trust people.”

Katie scoffed. She looked away and licked her lips, as if she was looking for something to say.

“Well. Suit yourself, then.”

She turned her back on him and started walking away down the hallway. Guilt gripped at Ben’s throat.

“Katie,” he called her, going after her. “Katie, wait up…”

Katie stopped, but not because of Ben: Jack had appeared right in front of them, blocking her way. She startled and moved back, almost crashing into Ben in the process.

It was only when Ben looked at the nephilim’s serious face that he realized they weren’t exactly having that conversation in a private place.

“Oh, hey, Jack, buddy,” he asked nervously. “How much of that did you hear?”

Jack lifted his eyes at him and took a deep breath.

“Katie’s right. Dean is lying to you, Ben.”


	9. Chapter 9

“I don’t know why he’s keeping these things from you,” Jack said as he guided them to the library. “But he knows exactly why the angels are after you. And now the demons too… Lucifer must have returned to Hell.”

“Lucifer?” Ben repeated. “Lucifer, as in… Satan? The Devil? That guy? He’s involved in this too?!”

“Lower your voice,” Jack instructed him. He paced around the library, running his hands through his hair nervously. “We told you angels need a vessel to stay on earth, right? But there are certain ones – the archangels, normal vessels aren’t able to contain them. It has to be chosen people, people who descend from a certain bloodline. Otherwise, the vessel burns out and they…”

“Okay, okay, Jack. Calm down,” Ben interrupted him. “You’re talking too fast. You’re saying I’m one of these… special vessels?”

“Yes.” Jack nodded. “You’re Michael’s Sword. His true vessel. That was what the demon was referring to.”

Ben took a moment to assimilate that information. It seemed like every time he got a new answer, five more questions popped in.

“Okay. And couldn’t they just have asked me nicely if I wanted to host an archangel inside of me?”

“Angels never ask for anything nicely,” Jack said. Ben couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or completely sincere. “And if you say yes to Michael, it could be catastrophic. Michael hates humans; he would have them all exterminated. He would go after Lucifer and the fight between the two could re-start the Apocalypse…”

“Wait, _re-start_?” Ben repeated. “You mean this has happened before?”

“It’s… it’s kind of a long story,” Jack admitted.

“Okay, well… can you give us the CliffNotes?”

“Why are you telling us all this?” Katie asked. “If the Winchesters didn’t want us to know…”

“Lying is wrong,” Jack stated matter-of-factly. He lowered his eyes and seemed very uncomfortable for a moment. “And it’s also my fault that all of this is happening.”

He made a pause as if he needed time to collect himself. Ben exchanged a look with Katie, who shrugged. She was obviously as confused by all of this as Ben had been.

“Sam and Dean… they locked this dimension’s Michael away, years ago, so he wouldn’t hurt anyone,” Jack explained. “But I opened a rift to another world where the Apocalypse had happened and the Michael from that reality slipped here.”

“You opened a what into a what?”

“Can he do that?” Katie asked.

“You’re asking me?” Ben shot back.

“I managed to bring some of the survivors from that world here,” Jack continued to explain. “We knew Michael and Lucifer came back here, but they slipped under our radar when we tried to find them. Rowena managed to re-open the rift temporarily, so some of the survivors returned to try and reconstruct their world. They thought they had a chance now that the remaining angels were without their leader. Some of them, like Bobby and Charlie, chose to stay. It’s been quiet for some weeks. I don’t think Dean expected Michael to go after you.”

“Right.” Ben’s head was buzzing, so he massaged his temples lightly. “You realize, absolutely none of that makes any sense to me.”

“Seconded,” Katie replied, staring at Jack quizzically.

“I couldn’t make it any briefer,” Jack pointed out.

Ben paced around the library, trying to wrap his head around all the information Jack had just dumped on him.

“Okay, bottom line, an evil angel who hates humans wants to use me to do his evil bidding on Earth…”

“Archangel,” Jack corrected. Ben wasn’t sure what was the difference and he preferred not to ask in order not to send Jack into another rambling explanation.

“… because I belong to… a special bloodline,” Ben continued. Something clicked inside of his head. “Is that why you said this had to do with my father?”

Jack stared at his shoes for a moment.

“In part,” he admitted, before looking up at him again. “And because we know who your father is.” He took a step towards Ben. “You know it, too. He’s a hunter and you used to know about the monsters and the demons. You’ve just… forgotten it.”

Of all the things Jack had said in the last twenty minutes, that one was by far the most unbelievable to Ben. He thought he’d made his peace with not knowing about his father a long time ago, but suddenly, Jack was offering him the possibility to know the answer to all the questions Ben had stopped asking when he was fourteen. It was a lot to handle. How could they possibly know who Ben’s father was, if even his mother didn’t know? Who was this man? What kind of man was he? Did he even know Ben existed? What did Jack mean that Ben had forgotten…?

His headache grew into a searing pain, stronger and more excruciating than ever before, as if lightening was running through his skull and setting him on fire. He whimpered and stumbled and he probably would have fallen over if a hand hadn’t come to rest on his chest and slowly helped him sit down on one of the chairs in the table. When he looked up, he saw Katie staring back at him. Her dark eyes were brimming with worry and suddenly Ben had to wonder.

If he truly had forgotten his father…

“… what else did I forget?” he muttered.

“A lot,” Jack said. “Haven’t you noticed? Your headaches have been persistent since all of this started because your memories are pushing to come back to the surface. Only they can’t, because they’re walled behind a spell that’s too strong for them to break on their own.”

“Who put the spell?” Ben asked.

“ _What_ put the spell?” Katie said at the same time.

It made sense she would ask that. She probably knew of a handful of creatures that would be able to erase memories like that.

And Jack did, too. He opened his mouth to answer…

“What are you doing?”

The question came forceful and angry. Dean, Sam and Castiel entered in the library.

Ben stood up immediately, almost instinctively shielding Katie with his body. He didn’t think that they would react violently to know that Ben had discovered the things they were trying to keep from him, but there was a tension in Dean’s shoulder, in his demeanor as he stalked towards them, that didn’t give Ben a good impression.

These men were dangerous, he realized with a startle. If they had fought archangels and won in the past, there was no telling what they were capable of. And he’d just come to them, without knowing exactly what they intended to do or why they were keeping the secret about his dad being a hunter from him.

Once again, Katie had been right. Ben was going to start listening to her a lot more if he wanted to solve this.

“What did you tell them?” Dean demanded to know. “Jack, what did you tell them?!”

Jack was the most powerful creature on the room. Ben had watched him kill an angel without blinking, he had cured their wounds with a wave of his hands. He could probably get rid of Dean with a snap of his fingers if he wanted to.

But he still shrunk and scampered away a little, as if he was fleeing from Dean’s anger.

“I…” Jack started.

“Is it true?” Ben interrupted him. “You knew about my dad? You knew about this… this wall I have in my head? You knew all of this and you conveniently forgot to mention it?”

It worked. Dean turned his attention towards him. His demeanor was still tense, but Ben saw something else in his eyes. Something deeper and primal and very, very intense.

Fear. Dean Winchester was afraid of what would mean for Ben to remember.

“Ben, it’s not what you think…” he started saying, but Ben wasn’t listening to him anymore.

He turned his back on him and walked up to Jack.

“Can you break it?”

Jack hesitated.

“Jack!” Dean shouted. “Don’t you dare…!”

“It’s my memory!” Ben shouted back. “I get to decide. And I’ve decided I want it back. So…”

Jack didn’t give him a warning. Perhaps he thought if he hesitated any longer, the Winchesters would find a way to stop him. Or perhaps the entire process was just forceful and painful enough to feel that way.

In any case, as soon as Jack’s fingers grazed against his forehead, Ben let out a cry out of pain and stumbled forwards, grabbing unto the table not to collapse on the floor. Someone was shouting and holding him, but Ben paid no attention to it.

He wasn’t there anymore.

 

* * *

 

He was in Cicero, Indiana, in the park where all the kids went to play. Ryan Humphrey stole his brand new Gameboy, the one he’d just got for his birthday.

_Well, you want me to go…?_

_No! Don't go over there! Only bitches send a grown-up._

_You're not wrong._

_And I am not a bitch._

His mom had been furious. She had accused Dean of teaching him to fight, but Ben had been thankful. All the other adults were always telling him to ignore the bullies, but Dean had actually taught him it was okay for him to fight back.

The monster came that very same night. It had hollow eye sockets and a round mouth full of sharp shark-like teeth. It took Ben kicking and screaming from its bed and escaped with him in the warm August night.

The girl in the dirty pink nightgown cried in the crate next to him, in the dark basement where the monster had stashed them away.

_Katie? It’s Katie, right?_

Katie’s parents had divorced around the previous Christmas. The other kids in the neighborhood commented it in whispers and preferred not to play with her, as if divorce was a contagious disease she could transmit.

Ben didn’t have a dad that would leave him, so he didn’t care.

_Don’t worry, Katie. Someone will come for us._

_Are you sure?_

_Yes. You’ll see. It’ll be okay._

He was glad to be right. He was glad to see Dean and his brother charging in the basement, breaking the cages and sneaking them out before the monster caught them.

And when it did, they had simply burned it away.

Ben wondered if they had been scared. He knew he had been terrified and he had to sleep with the lights on for a very long time afterwards. He was too old for his mom to come console him in the middle of the night when he had nightmares, which was why his pride was a little wounded whenever she had to do so.

_Don’t worry, Ben. It’s okay. Nothing’s gonna hurt you again._

_How do you know? What if there are more monsters?_

Lisa carded her fingers through his hair slowly until he managed to stop crying and then left a kiss on the top of his head.

_It doesn’t matter how many there are. Your dad is out there fighting them._

He had said it with the same certainty to Katie when the other kids began to forget about the monster. They couldn’t. They talked about it often while they sat on the swing set, swaying lightly and ignoring everyone else in the playground.

_What if something happens to him? What if he dies?_

_Nothing will happen to him. He has his brother watching his back._

Katie had come to say goodbye to him the day he and his mom moved to Michigan. They were eleven at the time and the two inches she had on him humiliated him, but lately he had been feeling something strange in his stomach whenever she smiled at him. A little as if he had swallowed a swarm of butterflies. It wasn’t bad, exactly, but it definitely made him somewhat uncomfortable.

_Promise me you will write._

_Yeah, of course. I’ll send you an email every week._

They’d stood outside his old, empty house, fidgeting with their fingers until Lisa called him.

_Well, take care, Benjamin._

_You too, Katherine._

They’d bumped their fists together like they always did and Ben had climbed in his mother’s car. As they drove away, he kept his eyes on the rearview mirror. Katie didn’t run after the car, but she stood there in what had been his street, her oversized denim jacket hanging from her small shoulders, with her bow tying up her dark brown hair. She looked sad, as if she was trying not to cry but the tears were slowly winning the battle. It was the first time in Ben’s short life that he regretted something and he didn’t like it: it was like a rattle in the back of his mind, a persistent feeling that he should have said or done something else, he didn’t know exactly what, but if he could figure it out, maybe he could convince his mom to go back just for a minute and…

They turned around the corner and Katie disappeared from his sight.

He didn’t know that would be the last time he saw her in a very long time and that when she sauntered back into his life, neither of them would be the same.

He’d kept his promise, at least for several months: he wrote about his new school, about the friends he was making, about his boring, normal life, completely devoid of monsters except for the ones he read about in his comic books. Katie’s answers were always short compared to his and they always arrived late, to the point sometimes he sent two or three emails for every one of hers. Until one day they’d completely stopped coming. He’d assumed she was busy and that she would get back to him at some point, but before he had time to worry too much about it, something monumental changed in his life.

It was a Thursday. Nothing exciting ever happened on Thursdays. He had no reason to think that Thursday would be different when he walked down the stairs in his pajamas and the only thought in his mind was cereal and milk and the math homework he hadn’t finished yet.

That was why it took him a few seconds to process the fact that his dad was sitting in their kitchen, holding hands with his mom and apparently doing little else. They both looked tired when they raised their eyes at him, as if they hadn’t slept the previous night, as if they had been sitting on those chairs in their kitchen waiting for the sun to come up.

_Ben, Dean is going to live with us now._

He never learned what they talked about that night. It went unsaid, just as so many other things in that house where they were a family for a while. Just as Ben never called him “dad”. Just as he’d never asked what had happened to Dean’s brother.

Dean’s eyes were haunted. It had taken a while for Ben to really find the word to describe them, but that was what they were. Eyes that were permanently exhausted, eyes that had seen too much. Ben was twelve, so he couldn’t possibly imagine what it would take for a man to have that look upon his eyes and he was naïve enough to believe that if Dean spent enough time with them, then he would forget about whatever it was that’d happened to him, just like the other kids in the playground had forgotten about their monster.

Sometimes, when Dean made eggs for him and his mom for breakfast, or when he put on his old school rock CDs and danced with Lisa in the living room until she burst out laughing, or when they sat together on the porch and Dean gave him advice on how to talk to the girl Ben wanted to invite to the school dance, it was as if the haunted look in his eyes disappeared. It was almost as if he was his dad, his normal dad, his dad who didn’t have a car with an arsenal in the trunk that they all pretended not to know about.

Dean had caught him snooping around on it once. He hadn’t been happy.

_Ben, mark my words. You will never, ever shoot a gun, ever._

_I know what's going on. You think something might be coming for us._

_There's nothing coming for us._

_I could do what you do. You could teach me how to shoot…_

_Shut up about the freaking gun, okay!_

Ben had been startled. Dean had never been that brusque with him, but he had been on edge for the last week or so.

His brother was back, somehow, and they started hunting again.

One night, he’d come home really late and he was acting weird. Ben had called for him and Dean had just shoved past him, his eyes straight ahead and mumbling like a maniac.

It had been terrifying, but not as much as the prospect of Dean walking out on them for good.

_You're a liar._

_Excuse me?_

_You say family's so important, but… but what do you call people who – who care for you, who love you even when you're a dick? You know you're walking out on your family, right?_

For the first time in almost a year, Ben sent an email to Katie. She was probably the only person she could talk to about this. What had happened when her parents got divorced? How had she managed it? Trying to get Dean home hadn’t worked, so what else could Ben do?

She’d never replied to it.

And then the demons came.

They were even worse than the monster that had taken him all those years ago. They were angry and they reeked of sulfur.

One of them had took possession of his mom. The blade of the knife she pressed against his throat was cold as ice.

_You know she's begging me to kill you. She says you hold her back. Never had a lick of fun since you were born._

The demon knew exactly what to say to hurt him even without stabbing him. That his mom had never actually wanted him. That she wasn’t even sure Dean was actually his dad, despite what she’d told him.

But none of that compared to the paralyzing horror of watching her sink a razor in her own stomach, the blood stain rapidly spreading through her shirt while Dean recited words in Latin…

The slap felt like a lightning bolt that exploded in his head and went down his entire body, shaking him awake.

_Come on, pull it together. Do you want your mom to die? Let's go!_

His mom’s head had lolled back and forth with the movement of the car and Ben’s hands felt wet with her blood. How could there be so much blood inside of someone…?

Castiel stood in front of him in the waiting room.

_What? He sent you to talk to me?_

His face was unreadable, but if Ben had to guess, he would’ve said that the angel almost pitied him.

_No. I’m sorry._

The hand he pressed against Ben’s forehead was gentle, but the pain that followed was the worst thing he’d ever felt. Like he was physically ripping something out of him, like he was changing and rearranging the thoughts in his head.

He left him with the first unexplainable migraine of Ben’s life and a dull grief in his heart that he could never understand. Matt, the guy his mom had been dating, had been killed by a street mugger ( _no, it had been the demons_ ) but he’d never liked him all that much, so it couldn’t have been because of him.

It was more as if he had lost something very important to him, but he couldn’t remember exactly what…

 

* * *

 

He was crying and he didn’t know how to stop.

The table in front of him and his own hands holding unto it so tight his knuckles were white came into focus, but the tears kept streaming down his cheeks. He felt dizzy and the frugal dinner he’d had was burning in the back of his mouth.

Someone was shouting his name, but he had to make a real effort to lift up his eyes. There were worried faces around him, but none of them were the one he needed to see right now.

He had to tell her. She needed to know.

She was by his side, a hand on his shoulder and her eyes opened wide with fear.

“I didn’t…” he started, but he had to stop to lean over himself and fight the nausea.

“Ben, it’s okay. Don’t try to talk. Hold on…”

“I didn’t forget you,” Ben blurted out. He closed his eyes and opened the again, focusing on Katie’s face again: “I didn’t forget you, Katie. _They_ made me forget you.”


	10. Chapter 10

“You said you’d wiped them up!”

“The human mind is incredibly resilient, Dean. Memories can’t just be wiped, though they can be… stored away.”

Dean was so furious he couldn’t come up with an answer. He just paced around the library, his fists clenched tight and his shoulders tense.

Ben ignored him and Castiel’s argument. He was slowly recovering from the wave of emotions that having his memory restored had caused. Sam had draped a blanket over his shoulders and sat by his side without saying a word. He probably knew there wasn’t much that he could have said to him anyway. Jack stood against a wall, as if he was still trying to make himself look small and inconsequential. Ben wanted to tell him that this wasn’t his fault, that he’d rather know the truth even if Dean was doing everything in his power to keep it from him.

But for now, he found himself unable to speak. He was still reeling and the only thing that was helping him not fall apart again was the fact that Katie hadn’t let go of his hand.

He held unto it like a shipwrecked man holds onto to a piece of wood. Of all the things he was furious about – Dean walking out on them, Castiel erasing their memories or storing them away or whatever it was that he had done, the angels stalking him and trying to use him – this was the one he couldn’t get past.

Dean wanted them to forget about him, fine. But why did they have to throw Katie under the bus too?

“I’m sorry,” he muttered, his forehead pressed softly against hers.

“It doesn’t matter,” Katie replied in a whisper. “I guess it had to be that way, right? We talked about monsters and your dad far too much when we were kids.”

That made sense, Ben supposed. Still didn’t make it right. He still wanted to punch both Dean and Castiel in the face and even though Sam had been kind enough to bring him a blanket and help him through some breathing exercises, Ben wasn’t too thrilled about him either.

If he hadn’t come back, if he hadn’t asked Dean to go hunting with him again…

He focused on Katie. Strangely, she seemed relieved. He wondered if she wasn’t angry with him anymore and if the mystery of why he couldn’t remember her had been finally laid to rest for her. It wasn’t because of anything she had done. It wasn’t because she wasn’t important. It was because a bunch of adults had made a shitty call for them and now they had to deal with all of that mess themselves.

“And you…!” Dean said, turning to Jack, but before he could continue, Castiel stepped in the middle of the two.

For an unassuming guy in a trench coat, he could look really threatening raising his chin at Dean with a death glare in his blue eyes.

“It’s not Jack’s fault,” he said, simply. “You couldn’t have kept this from Ben forever. Don’t you see it, Dean? The fact that Michael came after him means that he truly is your blood.”

That managed to wind Dean down. He let his arms hang loose at the sides of his body and slowly, he turned towards Ben. His eyes were shinning as if he too was barely holding back tears.

That only made Ben angrier, if that was possible.

“Oh, fuck me!” he exclaimed. “You’re really going to tell me you didn’t know?!”

“Ben…”

Ben didn’t want to listen to whatever weak, lame excuse Dean was about to give him. He stood up (somehow, he managed to do it without his knees giving in) and marched away, not even sure where the door he’d just crossed lead.

It turned out to be a kitchen and it turned out to have some steps he almost stumbled over. Now he was thinking he should have gone for the room’s hallway, because Dean came after him and Ben had nowhere to escape from him.

“Ben, I _didn’t_ know,” he said.

“Bullshit!”

“It’s true!” Dean insisted. “Your mom, she… she always said she was sure it had been some other guy and…”

“Yeah, well, she probably said that because she knew you were bound to be a deadbeat,” Ben shot back.

That managed to shut him up. Now it was Ben who was pacing around the limited space from the kitchen, refusing to even look at him.

It was too much. Everything inside of him felt like it was boiling with white searing rage. He wanted to scream, he wanted to punch walls and he wanted to never see Dean’s stupid face ever again.

Silver lining: his headache was gone.

“Ben. Please, look at me.”

Ben stopped his pacing around and leaned against the wall. He had to take a couple of breaths to find his voice again. He really hated the fact that he was an angry crier.

“You know at the end of the day it makes no difference, right?” he stated. “You still walked out on us. You still had our memories erased…”

“I had to keep you safe!”

“Oh, yeah, and that worked great!” Ben replied. “I’m being hunted by Heaven and Hell and my mom is MIA. Really bang-up job there!”

“And do you think that’s not tearing me apart?” Dean shouted. “Do you think I’m not worried sick about her and that I wasn’t climbing up the walls when Jack lost contact with you? If something had happened to you, I never would’ve forgiven myself!”

“Why lie to me, then? Because that’s all you’ve done since I’ve got here.”

“I didn’t lie…”

“No, you just… conveniently forgot to mention some things,” Ben concluded.

There was a twisted satisfaction in rendering Dean speechless, even if it evaporated as quickly as it came. This was pointless, he realized. Nothing Dean said was going to change what he’d done and nothing Ben said would convince Dean that he had been in the wrong. He knew him all too well.

They were too similar in that aspect.

Dean opened his mouth to say something else, but he never got to. Mary burst into the kitchen, cellphone in hand.

“Jody called,” she announced. “They found Claire. She’s in a hospital in Iowa.”

It was almost as if she’d sucker-punch all the anger out of Ben. He breathed in deep, almost scared to ask but knowing it was inevitable:

“And my mom?”

Mary looked at him with sympathy.

“I’m sorry. Jody and the girls are travelling there now, but for what they let on, Claire was in a real bad shape and there were no signs of Lisa.”

That wasn’t the answer that Ben wanted to hear at all. Dean rubbed his face and shook his head, like a dog coming out of the water.

“Okay. We’ll go there too, with Jack. He can cure her and we’ll ask her what happened.”

It sounded like a semblance of a plan. Ben followed Dean and Mary back to the library. Jack was already moving his shoulders, as if he was preparing his invisible wings for the flight. Dean turned around at the last second.

“You’re not going,” he told Ben.

“Are you kidding me right now?” Ben asked. “It’s my mom!”

“You need to stay and…”

“And what? Sit around with my thumb up my ass? ‘Cause that’s not…”

Dean didn’t let him continue. Ben stepped back when he saw his father walking up to him, but Dean simply put his arms around him and pulled him for a hug so tight Ben could’ve sworn his entire back crack. His head ended clashing against Dean’s plaid shirt, drowning out the rest of his protests.

Ben didn’t hug him back. Even before he’d had time to consider it, Dean stepped back and cupped Ben’s face in his hands.

“You need to stay because it’s safe here,” he explained. “Out there, there’ll be angels and demons all aiming for you and if you go where your mother is, they’ll follow you and it will make it harder for us to get to her. Do you understand that, Ben? The best way you can help her is by staying out of the fight.”

Ben was slightly aware that Dean was manipulating him into agreeing with him. He didn’t like it.

He also didn’t like admitting Dean had a point. He stepped away from him and crossed his arms over his chest, defensively. Dean searched through his jean pocket and finally handed him a cellphone.

“We’ll call you as soon as we know something.”

“You better bring her back,” Ben muttered.

“I will,” Dean promised him. “Okay? I’m not gonna let anything happened to her. To either of you.”

It would have been nice to be able to believe him. He stepped away and disappeared along with Sam and Jack. Ben hoped that the pit in his stomach didn’t meant that he was going to vomit again.

The remaining people in the bunker – Katie, Castiel, Mary and Bobby – were all sitting or standing around in the library, staring at him in uncomfortable silence. It was only then that Ben wondered if they had all heard his argument with Dean in the kitchen.

It didn’t matter. He stuck his chin up in the air and sat right down next to Katie again. That was enough to get the others to move, at least.

“Well, it looks like it’ll be a long night, so I better go make some coffee,” Mary commented, casually, as if any of that hadn’t just happened.

Ben followed her with his eyes while she headed for the kitchen and realized with a start that she was _his grandma_. That was so bizarre he found it difficult to wrap his head around that idea.

Bobby stood up and clasped his hand on Ben’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry, kid. I know you’re worried, but Sam and Dean are good men. If they say they’ll help your mom, then I’m sure they will.”

Ben muttered his thanks for that comment, because he literally couldn’t think of anything else to say. Bobby followed Mary into the kitchen, leaving him and Katie alone with Castiel. The angel was standing against the wall, looking sheepishly at them. In the end, he stalked towards the table and leaned forwards on a chair.

“I’d like to… apologize to you, Ben,” he said. “It was not my intention to cause you or your mother harm…”

“Look, man, I don’t blame you,” Ben said, even though he did, a little bit. He was just furious enough to blame anyone and anything that had to do with the situation he was currently in, but he knew he couldn’t let his emotions get the better of him. Otherwise, he’d just run out of there, hot-wire the car and drive himself to Iowa. But he needed to keep his focus on what had really happened: “Dean made his call. This is on him.”

“I have questions, though,” Katie chimed in. “Like, several, if you don’t mind answering them.”

Castiel nodded as if to say “go ahead”. Bobby and Mary returned from the kitchen, carrying a platter full of four steaming mugs of coffee and a plate full of cookies.

It was a party, Ben supposed. He picked up one of the cookies, but Katie didn’t even touch her coffee.

“Most of them regard you, actually,” she continued. God, she was like a dog with a bone. “For starters, why is an angel working with humans?”

Castiel sighed, as if he sometimes wondered the same thing. He moved a chair back and sat down with all of them.

“I’ve always said I’m a poor example of an angel,” he started. “Years ago, I had orders to fulfill regarding the Apocalypse. I chose not to follow them, even though I knew doing so would be turning my back on Heaven.”

“And you shacked up with a woman and had Jack?” Kelly said.

“That came afterwards,” Castiel replied, with a little shrug.

Ben narrowed his eyes. Jack seemed older than both he and Katie, yet Castiel spoke about his friendship with Sam and Dean as if it had been a recent development. Either the math was way off or Castiel was lying in some capacity, which, given who he was friends with, wouldn’t surprise him.

Katie's general mistrust for people was really rubbing on him. He continued sipping from his mug and munching on the cookies, looking at the cellphone that stubbornly refused to ring.

“So you wouldn’t happen to know what’s going on in Heaven right now,” Katie said. “With Michael and all that mess.”

Castiel intertwines his fingers over the table and tilted his head. He seemed a little impressed that Katie was asking those questions, though perhaps that was Ben assigning emotions that weren’t there to his blank face.

“The situation in Heaven is dire,” he explained. “There are only a handful of angels remaining and their power is greatly diminished. Mine is, too. I can still cure small wounds and ailments, but I am unable to bring someone back from the death, for example. My wings are in tatters, which is why I can’t fly like Jack does. Most angels are in the same state as me. I wouldn’t find it hard to believe that they would immediately join ranks with Michael and the angels from the other world if they were promised it would restore their home.”

Ben stopped obsessing over the silent phone for a moment and looked up.

“Is that why Manakel was so obsessed with getting me to be a vessel for his boss?”

“Most likely, yes,” Castiel confirmed. “Although you’re not Michael’s perfect vessel. That would be Dean, but you’re a suitable alternative. I believe they went after you because they thought you’d be weaker and would agree without making too much of a fuss.”

“Huh.” Ben toyed with the cookie in his hand. “Guess we put a stinker all over that.”

He didn’t know why he felt strangely proud of that or why Mary smiled at the observation. But it seemed adequate.

“And how does Satan fit into all of this?” Katie asked next.

Mary lowered her coffee mug and gave them a strange look.

“Has Jack told you about him?”

“Only that he was probably back in Hell and he had an interest in getting Ben killed,” Katie said, with a shrug, as if talking about Ben’s likely death by demons wasn’t a big deal. “Which, you know, it’s kind of metal.”

“Why, thank you,” Ben replied, rolling his eyes.

“It’s not in his best interest that Michael restores Heaven to its former power,” Castiel said. “If he’s back to his plans of destroying the Earth… but who can know what Lucifer is planning on doing next?” he sighed.

It sounded less like he was talking about the actual Devil and more like he was tired of commenting the exploits of his family’s black sheep. Which, Ben supposed, was exactly what was happening.

“Alright.” Katie knocked back down all of her coffee and stood up. Her eyes were glimmering as if she had suddenly made a decision. “Do you have books about demon or angel lore in this joint?”

“Several,” Bobby said, but he frowned with suspicion. “Why?”

“Well, Mary said it was going to be a long night,” Katie pointed out. She stood up and started looking at the books in the shelves with interest. “We might as well use it to educate ourselves.”

That had not had occurred to Ben. Up until now, they had been escaping from all the threats that had been thrown at them with just a few glimpses of information and a lot of luck. If they knew more, they might have a better chance at fighting back. He stood up to follow Katie.

“Wait, hold on.” Mary put her mug down and walked up towards them. “You don’t need to do this. We’ve got this. You don’t have to…”

“Mary,” Ben said. He took a deep breath and corrected himself: “Grandma.”

That seemed to disarm Mary enough for him to say his piece:

“I know you’re probably on Dean’s side of the argument that I should have to remain as ignorant as possible about everything and anything supernatural, though I hope you won’t erase my memory to achieve that.”

“Ben…” Mary started protesting.

“But like it or not, I’m part of this now,” Ben continued. “Until we find a way to get Michael off my back, shouldn’t I know at least how to defend myself?”

Bobby let out a chuckle. “Your grandkid’s got a point.”

“But Dean will be furious,” Castiel argued. He seemed worried.

Neither of them tried to tell Mary what to do, though. Ben kept looking at her, silently waiting for her response.

In the end, Mary sighed deeply.

“He’s right, Dean won’t like this,” she said. “But you’re also right, Ben. How good are you at memorizing things?”

Ben almost felt great as they laid down the books on the table and Mary went to get them more coffee. Absorbing information, getting himself lost in a topic of research was easy, it was what he was used to do. Except he wasn’t finding out about human biology or anatomy now.

“This exorcism will expel any demon right away and send them packing back to Hell for good,” Bobby told him, showing him a long Latin litany scribbled in someone’s neat handwriting. “So if any of them ever comes for you, it’s a good idea to keep it in your memory. Start there. And also learn all the sigils and traps to keep them away from you.”

Ben wondered who had this leather-bound journal, with notes and papers sticking all over it, belonged to. But also…

“Is there something similar that can be done for angels?” he asked. “Like, an exorcism or a spell or something to get them to vacate the premises?”

Mary, Bobby and Castiel all looked at each other, frowning slightly.

“I’ve never heard of anything like that,” Mary said.

“Me neither,” Bobby added, shaking his head. “And I’ve read up a lot about angels, trust me.”

Ben did. If they knew of something that would allow someone to kick an angel out outright, they wouldn’t be son concerned with Michael possessing him in the first place, right?

“I have.”

Castiel’s deep voice sounded deeper for a moment. He put his hand on his throat for a moment, as if he was remembering something unpleasant.

“I don’t know the exact words of the spell. I don’t think any angel does. A demon… a very old one tried to use it against me once. It’s not an experience I’m eager to repeat.”

Ben ignored all of that and went directly to the point that interested him the most: “So what you're saying is, it exists.”

“If it does, it’s been forgotten. The Princes of Hell have all died and the demons they would trust with their knowledge on how to fight angels are also either gone or on Lucifer’s side…”

“But it exists,” Ben argued, stubbornly. “If it exists, it can be found. We can use it to help Gary… and if things go south, you could use it to help me.”

“Well, aren’t you an optimist?” Katie said.

“I’m just saying, there’s a lot of basis here and we should have them all covered.”

“Need I remind you again that you don’t have to cover anything?” Mary replied.

“And even if we found a friendly ancient demon that could tell us how to perform the thing, there’s no guarantee it’ll work on Michael,” Bobby said. “He’s an archangel. He’s far more powerful than your average seraph.”

“Yeah, I heard it the first two dozen times you guys mentioned that,” Ben said, with a huff. “Look, I’m just trying to figure out a way out of this mess. You keep saying I shouldn’t worry about it, but that’s kind of hard to do when it’s my life and the life of the people I love on the line.”

No one had a comeback for that.

In the profound silence that followed that statement, Dean’s cellphone started ringing and vibrating. Ben was suddenly ripped from his researching mood when he remembered exactly why they had been waiting on that call.

He picked it up with trembling fingers and placed the phone against his ear.

“Hello? Dean?”

He had been so anxious he hadn’t looked at the screen. He had been so ready to hear from news for a moment his brain couldn’t comprehend what he was hearing.

There was a woman crying softly on the other end.

And not just any woman.

The hair on the back of his head stood up and his heart started pounding hard against his ribcage.

“Hello?” he repeated, and then more desperately as the crying became louder: “Hello, who’s there?”

He knew he would hear her voice even before she spoke, a part of him knew. It still felt like someone had taken a hammer directly to his stomach when she tearfully called his name:

“Ben?”

“Mom!” he shouted. The library around him seemed to spin on its axis. He held on to the table. “Mom? Where are you? Are you okay? Mom!”

The crying became fainter, as if someone had taken the phone away.

“Hello, Benjamin,” another voice said. It sounded like Gary, but all wrong. “This is unfortunate. I was hoping to reach your father, but I guess you’ll have to do.”

All the rage Ben thought he had exorcised by screaming at Dean came back immediately, like a sudden fire rising from the ashes and making the blood in his veins boil.

“Manakel, you son of a bitch!” he shouted. “If you hurt her, I swear to God, I’ll hunt you down and stab you right through the heart!”

“Careful. Remember, it’s not just _my_ heart you’d be putting the blade through.”

Ben gritted his teeth. He wanted to shout more threats, but what good would that be? Manakel had the upper hand and he knew it.

“I took the liberty of restoring your mother’s memories to get this number,” the angel continued to explain. “We’ve had a long chat. Don’t worry. It was not on my best interest to hurt her and I’m sure we can keep it that way. Provided you cooperate, of course.”

Ben closed his eyes. This was a nightmare. It had been a nightmare from the start, but this was the worst of it and he couldn’t bring himself to wake up.

“What do you want?”

“I knew you’d be a reasonable young man. I’m going to send you a direction, not far from where you are. You’ll come alone. You will tell no one. Not the Winchesters, nor their traitor friend. Not even that feisty girlfriend of yours, do you understand?”

Ben gritted his teeth.

“Do you understand, Ben?” Manakel insisted.

“Yes.”

“Good.” Manakel was almost gloating and it made Ben want to vomit again. “Can’t wait to hear you say that to Michael.”


	11. Chapter 11

“It’s my mother!”

“Ben, we know that! But you can’t just run headfirst into this!”

It felt like he had been arguing and screaming his lungs out for hours. His face burned with rage, rage that Mary wasn’t understanding, that she insisted on calling Dean even when Manakel had told him specifically not to do that, even when doing so could yield horrible consequences for Lisa.

“I have to go. Maybe I can catch him by surprise, use the angel banishing symbol…”

“You think he won’t be expecting you to do just that, boy?” Bobby asked him.

“He won’t be alone,” Castiel added. “He probably called reinforcements. As far as we know, there could be an entire garrison waiting for you there. You won’t be able to cast the sigil fast enough.”

“Ben.” Katie took a step forwards and put her hands on his shoulder, forcing him to look at her face. “Listen. This is what he wants you to do. He wants you to be scared and angry so you will make a mistake. You can’t let him get to you.”

Ben opened his mouth to protest, even though he knew in his gut that Katie was right, that this was exactly what Manakel expected him to do.

Mary’s cellphone rang, breaking the argument for the moment. Ben started pacing around in the library, with his fists clenched and trying to think of something (anything!) for him to do. There had to be a way, some way to distract them, to slip by Bobby and Castiel’s watch unnoticed and…

Katie came around the shelves and stood in front of him, her arms crossed over chest and her dark eyes glaring at him.

“Whatever you’re thinking about doing, you need to stop,” she told him.

“I’m not thinking about doing anything,” Ben said, far too fast for it to be believable. Katie arched an eyebrow and Ben groaned like a student caught in the middle of mischief by a teacher.

“Look, you heard what Claire said,” Katie reminded him. “There’ll be world-ending consequences if you give yourself up to Michael.”

“Yeah, well, Patience could be wrong.”

“Are you really willing to risk it?”

Ben growled again and nervously ran his fingers through his hair. Katie was right. There was no point in even thinking about it. If he allowed Michael to wear him like a second hand suit, his mom would probably die in the subsequent Apocalypse anyway. He had to think about the bigger picture.

But still…

“What am I supposed to do? Leave her to die?”

“Of course not and no one is saying you do that,” Katie argued. “But you need to take a deep breath, Ben. I know it’s hard. But we’ll come up with something.”

That got him to make a double-take at her.

“By ‘we’, you mean… you and I?”

Katie avoided his glance and crossed her hands over chest.

“Well, you know. We’re partners, right?”

Strangely, that calmed him down. Yes, Katie was impulsive and sometimes reckless, but she was without a doubt the only person in that bunker he truly trusted had his best interest at heart.

“Yeah,” he said. “We’re partners.”

Mary came around the shelves, waving the cellphone at Ben.

“Claire wants to talk to you,” she said, simply.

“Hello?”

“Ben.” Claire’s voice sounded broken and tired, as if she had just been through some really awful things. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. They ambushed us and they dragged us out of the truck. They beat me within an inch of my life, I couldn’t…”

“Claire,” Ben cut her off. “It doesn’t matter. I know you tried.”

This calmed her down a little bit, but she still sounded stressed out when she spoke again:

“Manakel took your mother away in a blue car. I couldn’t make out the plate. I’m sorry. But she seemed fine when they were taking her.”

“Of course she was fine,” Ben sighed. The thought that it could be any other way was unbearable, so he didn’t even entertain it. “She’s a hostage.” He stopped for a moment, thinking fast. “How many angels were there with him?”

Claire made a pause as if she was thinking about it.

“Three,” she said in the end. “The two that almost killed me and the one who captured Lisa and took her to him. Manakel stood back the whole time, the bastard.”

So four, total. That didn’t seem like an entire garrison, but if one single angel could cause that much chaos and destruction…

The wheels in Ben’s head started turning fast.

One angel was more than enough keep watch over a hostage. Katie and him had Claire’s sword and Jack was too busy searching for them. There was literally no way that Claire could have fought them all off. And Manakel knew this. So why had he taken so many of them with him? Castiel had said they were only a handful of angels left and most had their wings destroyed, which explained why Manakel had made his getaway in a car. Four angels to capture only one woman, it just seemed so excessive. And he’d stayed back the whole time, as if he didn’t want to even risk getting hurt or killed…

“There’s… there’s more,” Claire said, as if she’d just remembered it. “He told me to tell you that Gary says hello.”

The answer became obvious in Ben’s head, like a ray of sunshine parting through the clouds.

_It’s not just my heart you’d be putting your blade through._

The demon had possessed his mother because it knew Dean wouldn’t attack her.

Ben licked his lips and swallowed loudly:

“Let me talk to Dean,” he requested.

“Ben?” Dean said when he picked up the phone.

“Manakel called,” Ben said. He explained to him everything he had said and the location he had given him, where he was holding Lisa.

“Well, you’re not going there!” Dean exclaimed.

“Of course not,” Ben said. “I’m not an idiot. That’s what he wants me to do.”

Katie gave him a weird look and Ben hoped no one else noticed. They might have realized he was talking out of his ass.

“You, Sam and Jack… you can handle that, right?” he kept saying. “You’re going to go there and you’re going to bring her back.”

“Yes,” Dean promised him. “I’m not gonna let anything happen to her, okay?”

Ben didn’t have to fake the way his voice broke when he added: “Yeah, you better not.”

Mary threw him a pitiful look as he handed her cellphone back to her.

“Ben, I’m sorry,” she said.

“I, uh… I’m tired,” Ben said, rubbed his temples for a moment. “I think I’m going to… I’m going to try to sleep.”

“Of course.” Mary stepped back and threw him a pitiful look. “You need to rest.”

Ben walked away down the hallway without looking at her. He found a charger in one of the drawers in the night table in his room and plugged in Dean's phone.

After a few seconds, Katie followed him.

“What was that?” she asked him, frowning. “You’re going to leave your mom’s fate in Dean’s hand?”

Ben gestured for her to close the door. After she did, he grabbed the phone and dialed the unknown number from where Manakel had called and put the call on speaker so Katie would hear it too.

The angel picked up at the first ring.

“You figured it out, didn’t you?” he asked on the other side. “I knew you would. Gary thinks highly of you. He believes you’re the smartest person he’s ever known.”

Ben sighed and closed his eyes.

There were two potential vessels for Michael. Manakel must have known by then, by Jack’s presence, that they were going to the Winchesters. He knew that when the brothers became involved, there would be no mercy: they were going to barge in, guns blazing, and kill every angel on sight to rescue Lisa. They were strong enough to do that and bold enough to die trying.

But Manakel had taken another hostage much, much sooner than all of this. One that only really mattered to Ben.

“Where did I send them?” he asked, tiredly. “What kind of trap did you set for them?”

“Michael wants the nephilim dead and the Winchesters too, if possible,” Manakel said. He sounded almost bored. “You see, years ago, Dean Winchester was important, so no matter what he did, how much he humiliated us or betrayed us, we couldn’t touch him because he was Michael’s Sword. When it became obvious that he was not going to fulfill his destiny, you were considered to take his place, but you were merely a child. You couldn’t have withstood the battle.” Manakel made a pause. “But you’re all grown up now. So Michael doesn’t need Dean that much anymore. Every angel waiting for him in that building has orders to kill him.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ben said, trying to show a bravery he didn’t really feel. “He’s gonna kill them all first. He’s gonna survive whatever you throw at him.”

“Your faith in the man is touching, Ben. It really is. I, too, once believed in my Father blindly, but… well, let’s say I put my faith in more tangible things these days.”

Ben pinched the bridge of his nose. The last thing he wanted was to discuss philosophy or theology with the asshole angel that was wearing his friend like a meatsuit.

“So what’s the big idea? I go wherever you are and give myself over to Michael and you release Gary and my mom?”

“Essentially,” Manakel said. “You can demand some contingencies, of course. Michael is not unreasonable. You can ask for the both of them to be kept safe in the oncoming battle. I know your dad tried to make the same arrangement for you and your mother years ago.”

In a single swoop, Manakel had waved away Ben’s protests about world-ending consequences if he agreed to that plan. Despite it all, Ben had to admire his intelligence a little bit.

That didn’t mean he believed a word the angel was saying.

“Okay,” Ben said, calmly. “Okay. We’re doing that.” He looked up to meet Katie’s eyes. She was leaning against the door, quiet as a mouth to prevent Manakel from discovering her presence in the room. “You have to include Katie in the deal, too.”

“Of course. Everyone you wish will remain unharmed,” Manakel assured him. “Except the Winchesters, I’m afraid.”

Ben took in a deep, shuddering breath.

“Send me the directions.”

 

* * *

 

It was a bad idea. Ben didn’t need anyone to tell him that.

“We should at least tell Mary,” Katie said.

“Two hours ago, you were all for not trusting Mary. Or anyone else,” he reminded her.

“Two hours ago, we weren’t in this mess.”

He hated to admit she had a point.

“We’re not going to tell her. Not yet, anyway. There’s still a chance that Manakel lied and my mom is where we sent the others.”

“Or Manakel told the truth and Dean, Sam and Jack are already dead,” Katie pointed out.

Ben didn’t want to think about that. If that was case, he’d knowingly let them walk into a trap in the hopes that they would rescue his mother. Their blood would be in his hands.

Dammit, he should have asked Manakel to put his mother on the phone again and made sure what he’d heard before wasn’t some sort of recording. Why didn’t he think of that before?

“We can still save Gary,” Ben insisted.

“How exactly do you propose we do that?”

“Maybe there’s a way to trap him,” he suggested. “You know, keep him trapped until we find that exorcism that Castiel told us about. If we can’t, we at least have to get my mom away from them. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Yes.” Katie hesitated for a moment. “But, Ben… worst case scenario…”

Ben almost wanted to laugh. There were so many things that could go wrong with their current plan that it was just hard to imagine what the worst case could be. He knew what the worst case would be for him: having his mom or Gary or Katie getting hurt. But there was an even worst case for everyone in general and he figured that was what they had to keep in mind.

“Worst case scenario: Michael possesses me, you take Claire’s sword and take me out.”

That stunned her into silence. That was probably a first.

“You can’t possibly be asking me to do that,” she said.

“I am.”

“No. You’re crazy.”

She stepped as if to get out of the room, but Ben stepped in front of her and grabbed her by the shoulders so she had no more remedy than to look at him in the eye.

“Katie. Listen to me. I don’t want to die.” He sighed. “I really don’t. But it would be so much worse knowing that a lot more people died because of me.”

“I don’t care!” she snapped. “You’re my best friend. You’re my _only_ friend. I’m not going to kill you!”

The way she said it broke Ben’s heart. It was hard for him to even fathom how alone she had been all this years. Dean might have acted like a douche by erasing his memories, but at least Ben had managed to have a relatively normal adolescence, with friends and girlfriends and a plan for his future. Katie’s had been plagued by nightmares she’d had to face alone. And now she’d finally find him again, the one person that could probably understand what she’d been through, he was asking her to do the unimaginable.

But it was necessary.

“You’ll do it,” he said. “You’re a hunter. It’s what you do. You kill monsters so other people don’t have to suffer, right? That’s the whole point of it.”

Katie’s lower lip trembled and her eyes glazed over. It looked like it was taking her every ounce of her will not to burst into tears. Ben stretched his hand, trying to hug her, but Katie moved away before he could even touch her. Ben pretended he didn’t see her wiping her cheeks with the sleeve of her jacket. He wished that he had something else to tell her, but it felt like any word at this point was superfluous.

“Let’s move. We’re wasting time,” he said instead.

The first part of their plan consisted in getting out of the bunker without anyone noticing.

It wasn’t as easy as they’d thought. Castiel was sitting in the library, quietly, with his hands on top of his knees, apparently doing nothing but stare into the emptiness. Katie and Ben stopped on a corner and looked at each other. Was he sleeping? Did angels sleep with their eyes open?

Katie made a gesture with her head towards Castiel and Ben nodded. She walked into the library calmly, as if she didn’t have a care in the world.

“Hey, Castiel?” she called him. “I need you to help me with a thing.”

It took a couple of seconds for Castiel to respond.

“A thing?”

“Yeah. In the bathroom.” Katie made a pause and added in a lower tone, as if she was embarrassed: “The toilet is clogged.”

“The toilet?” Castiel repeated. “And what do you expect me to do about that?”

“Well, you live here and you’re a nearly all-powerful being. You need to go fix that.”

There was a moment of silence and Ben panicked, his heart beating so fast he was convinced Castiel could hear it. He was unto them. He had to be. No one could possibly swallow that bald-face lie…

The scraping of a chair against the floor and Castiel’s heavy footsteps heading in the opposite direction calmed him down slightly.

“You’re not coming?” Castiel asked.

“Uh… no. And if I were you, I wouldn’t… breathe a lot while in there.”

Castiel sighed deeply and then his steps disappeared in the distance.

Ben breathed out. He couldn’t believe that had worked.

“What are you doing?” Katie asked when she returned to their hiding spot. “Let’s go, come on!”

They tried to tiptoe up the stairs and Ben hoped that the sound of the door closing behind them wasn’t too loud. They took a moment to make sure that everything was ready with the car (the sword, the extra gas, some water bottle for the way, Dean’s fully charged cellphone) and then they looked at each other one more time.

They couldn’t keep stalling. They had two minutes at the most before Castiel realized Katie had lied to him and they were gone.

But as they stood around their stolen car, Ben couldn’t bring himself to open the door.

“You always get jittery before a hunt,” Katie told him. “It’s normal.”

Ben wanted to say that he was a little more than just “jittery”, but he couldn’t find a word strong enough to describe the pure terror that he was feeling. And yet, he already knew that he was going to get in that car and drive towards Manakel as if he had something more than a good poker face and a half-baked plan.

“Katie, listen. If something happens…”

“No,” she cut him off. “Nothing will happen, okay? So don’t give me that defeatist talk, Benjamin…”

She tried to turn his back on him, but Ben grabbed her arm. Katie turned to him with a frown (“What are you…?”) before he shut her up by pulling her in close to him and holding her as tight as he could against his body, closing his eyes and sinking his nose in her black, soft hair. She felt so tiny in his arms. She was always moving and talking and charging ahead so much that it was for him to realize just how much shorter and thinner than him she really was.

After a few seconds of surprise, Katie’s hand came to rest against his bicep. She squeezed it as if to reassure him and then softly pushed him back.

She smiled at him. Amazingly, it didn’t look like she was forcing it.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said.

“I know. I know it will be. Why wouldn’t it?” Ben replied with a shrug.

They were lying to themselves, of course. But that lie was the last thing they needed to get on their way.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I originally planned this to be the last chapter, but well... there's still a lot that needs to happen.

The point of encounter was only a twenty minute drive from Lebanon, near another, even smaller town called Burr Oaks. Ben was glad that was the case, because he didn’t think he could drive much longer with his hands trembling the way they did. There was a knot in his stomach and a lump in his throat that made it hard for him to breathe. He really wished that Katie was riding in the car by his side and he could hold her hand while he sped down this empty straight road.

He didn’t see another car in miles. He didn’t know if that was because he was driving near a town that only had a couple hundred residents or because it was the crack of dawn. The soft distant glimmer actually shocked him when he noticed it. It felt like this night had last an eternity. He was tempted to stop and actually take the time to watch what could basically be the last sunrise of his life, but he didn’t have the time.

Goddammit, he was only a few months away from making it to twenty. He really didn’t want to die.

He still slowed down when he saw the other car parked right beside the road. Closer than was probably wise. He took a deep breath and opened his door. He hoped the fact his knees were shaking wasn’t too noticeable.

The occupants of the other car did the same thing. Manakel exited the driver’s seat. He was still wearing Gary’s favorite shirt and ripped jeans and it would have been easy, in the morning’s faint light, to pretend that was really his friend walking up towards him after a long night of partying.

But the triumphant smirk on his lips most definitely didn’t belong to Gary.

The other angel that came with him was possessing a middle aged man in a grey suit. He opened the backseat’s door and helped someone get out as well.

Ben’s breathing got caught in his throat.

“Mom!”

She looked like a mess. Her clothes were stained with dirt and blood and her dark hair was all tangled up. The eyes she raised towards him were puffy and red, as if she’d been crying for hour, but now they were defiantly dried. Her chapped lips parted with a sigh of relief.

“Ben! Thank God!”

She stretched her tied hands towards him, but the angel in the suit squeezed her arm to get her to stay still.

“Well, as you can see, Ben, I’ve kept my end of the bargain,” Manakel said.

Ben blatantly ignored him.

“Mom, are you okay?!” he asked, talking loudly. “Did they hurt you?”

“I’m fine,” she promised him. “Ben, don’t do what they tell you. Please don’t do it.”

“That’s enough of you, Mrs. Braeden,” Manakel interrupted her. He sounded irritated, like he was tired of all this humans not behaving like they were supposed to. “Ben is a big boy that can make decisions for himself. Isn’t that right?”

Ben clenched his jaw.

“I already said I’d do it. So just… just let the both of them go.”

“Very well.” Manakel sighed. He sounded a little tired. “It’s a shame. I did like this boy, but a deal is a deal. I will bow out and call Michael. Alphaeon, here, is going to stay make sure you keep your end. Does that sound fair to you?”

“Ben, no,” Lisa said, her voice cracking down with fear. “Don’t do it, please. You don’t know what it will do to you…”

“Mom,” Ben interrupted her. He didn’t think he could hear speaking any more without his resolution disappearing completely. “It’s okay. Do you hear me? It’s going to be okay. Just take Gary with you and drive away. I need you to do that for me, mom.”

Alphaeon and Manakel exchanged tired looks, as if that entire conversation bored them. Manakel opened his mouth to say something else…

Ben saw the moment that everything went to Hell. He saw it in the angel’s eyes, and panic twisted up inside of him.

“What’s that sound?” Manakel asked, tilting his head towards Ben.

“I… I don’t hear anything,” Ben lied.

He didn’t have time to react. Manakel walked up towards him and when Ben tried to block his path, he pushed him the car with enough strength that Ben let out a whimper and dropped to the ground. He heard his mother shout his name, but the most terrifying sound was the trunk of the car clicking open.

Katie sprung up with a scream, but the angel moved faster: he grabbed the wrist of the hand she was holding the sword with and twisted it up until Katie shouted. The sword clattered on the pavement, uselessly. Manakel pulled Katie out of the trunk as if she didn’t weight more than a rag doll.

“Ben, I really thought you were above this sort of trickery,” he said. He sounded more irritated than angry. “She breathes too loudly for it to have worked.”

Ben stood up rubbing the shoulder he had hit against the car. He looked closely at Katie’s face. She nodded towards him, or maybe he thought he saw her nodding because that was what he wanted to see. She still clutched the cellphone that Manakel hadn’t noticed with her free hand.

And then, something wonderful happened to Ben. He realized, all of the sudden, that he wasn’t scared anymore. He had done everything that could be done and now the rest was out of his hands. Or maybe he had finally lost his mind, but somehow, he found the cheekiness necessary to smile at Manakel.

“Well… I had to try.”

“It was a stupid attempt, but I’m willing to overlook it…”

“How mighty of you, featherbrains,” Ben said, rolling his eyes. “You kidnap my mom and my best friend, you almost got Claire killed, and I’m supposed to be grateful because you weren’t as big a dick as you could’ve been?”

Manakel seemed stunned, as if he couldn’t believe that Ben was speaking to him in that tone of voice.

“I’d be careful now, if I were you,” he warned. “I can still call the whole thing off.”

“You won’t,” Ben said.

Manakel lifted Katie’s arm and tightened his grip around her wrist until the bones cracked loudly. Katie screamed out in pain.

“Alright, alright!” Ben lifted his hands. “Chill. Just wait a second, will you?”

“Wait for what?” the angel snapped.

Ben heard them before he saw them. The flutter of wings, the click of a gun safety being removed. His smile became wider.

“For the cavalry.”

The gunshot boomed in the open air, and it was as if the sound had sparked an explosion, because everything started moving at the same time. Alphaeon let go of Lisa, just in time to move out of the path of the bullet headed towards him. Katie turned and started trying to kick at Manakel’s shins, which made the angel turn to look at her… and lose sight of the sword still lying on the ground.

Ben didn’t stop to think. He lunged forwards and grabbed the hilt, swinging it wildly over his head, not even sure where he was pointing. It hit with a clang against Manakel’s own blade, with a vibration that expanded painfully down Ben’s arm. He whimpered, but tried to look at the bright side: at least he’d let go of Katie. Ben stood up, holding the sword up. Just a few steps behind him, grunting and panting, both Sam and Dean were fighting Alphaeon, but Ben didn’t have time to see how that was going before he had to hold the sword up to defend himself from Manakel’s attack.

The sword trembled in his hand and Ben had to make an effort to keep holding unto the hilt.

“You’re nothing but an insolent child!” Manakel shouted at him. “You don’t even know how to use that thing!”

“I’m a fast learner, dude!” Ben quipped and then did something that was truly insane: he laughed. He laughed hard and long, with his blood beating in his ears and the adrenaline coursing to his head so hard it made him almost dizzy. “Bring it on!”

Manakel ran forwards, but he stumbled backwards as Jack appeared suddenly in front of him, his hand extended to repel him. He looked over his shoulder at Ben:

“Get your mother!”

He didn’t have to say it twice. Still holding the sword up to have some sort of protection, Ben ran around the car.

In the confusion, Lisa had managed to crawl away from Alphaeon. She was hiding behind their stolen car, while Katie tried to unbind her with only one hand. The other one, the one that Manakel had broken, hanged uselessly to the side. Ben cringed, but hurried up to help her.

“Hey, mom,” he said, trying to smile as he pulled from the rope.

The damn angels had made the knot so tight it had burned Lisa’s skin, but as soon as she was free, she placed her arms around Ben’s neck and pulled him in for a hug.

“I was so worried!” she cried out.

“It’s fine,” Ben assured her. “It’s gonna be fine. Let’s go.”

Later, Ben would remember that as the last lie he’d ever told his mother. All the other ones (the times the times he’d read or watched a movie when he wasn’t supposed to, the times he’d got drunk, the times he’d sneaked with a girl) seemed petty and unimportant in comparison, but he came to regret every single one of them. Not as much as that one, though.

Katie grabbed the sword and opened the backseat door for Lisa…

Jack flew past them and landed on the cement with a whimper of pain. Somehow, Manakel had pushed them around and now he was running at them, his blade raised high and his face deformed in a grimace of rage. Katie tried to stand in his way, but with a flicker of his wrist, he also sent her flying away.

The blade flashed in the early morning sun, heading directly towards Ben’s face.

Something pushed him out of the way. Not a force, not like the power that had pinned him to the wall back in his home. Human hands, hands that had bathed him and hugged him and combed his hair, those hands grabbed him and with a strength he’d never suspected they had, pushed him out of the way. Ben stumbled and lost his balance, the cold terror of a terrible suspicion heavy inside of his chest.

By the time he turned around, it was too late.

Manakel was holding Lisa’s body against him, almost lovingly, if it wasn’t because of the rage in his expression and the fact his weapon sank to the hilt in her chest.

“No!” Ben shouted. “No, mom!”

Lisa fell to the ground soundlessly when the angel released her.

Angry steps headed their way, but Ben paid no attention. He dragged herself towards Lisa and picked her up, brushing the hair from her face. Her eyes were closed and her head fell limp to the side. Ben cradled her against his chest, patting her in the face in an attempt for waking her up that he already knew, deep inside of his guts, would be useless.

“Mom, please. Mom, come on,” he begged. His heart was getting strangled, like it too had stopped beating. He forced himself to breathe in and screamed at the top of his lungs: “Jack! Jack, I need help! Jack!”

Through the tears burning in his eyes, through his own screams that he couldn’t seem to stop, Ben saw what happened next as if it had barely anything to do with him.

Manakel stepped on Jack’s back, preventing him from moving. Dean ran up tohim, but Manakel punched him in the face so hard he knocked him to the ground. He threw his blade towards Sam, hitting him in the hand and knocking the gun out of it, and with all his enemies disarmed or out of air, the angel jumped inside the car he’d arrived in.

It was only then that Ben’s brain started working again.

The last time he’d been paralyzed with terror. He remembered Dean’s slap, the crisp and sudden pain, the way he’d screamed in his face.

_Do you want your mother to die?_

No. But it was too late for that.

The only thing he could do was stop the asshole that’d killed her from running away.

Someone shouted his name, but he wasn’t listening. He jumped inside of the car and stomped on the accelerator. The backseat door thumped shut, and with a glance at the rearview mirror, he noticed that Katie had jumped in as well.

“What are you doing?” she shouted at him. “Ben, stop the car!”

Ben ignored her and focused all of his attention on Manakel’s dark blue car, speeding down the road in front of them. A cold resolution had taken over his mind and he was going to follow it to the end.

He was going to kill him. He didn’t care anymore that he was possessing Gary, he didn’t care that he would probably die trying. He was going to go after Manakel and stab him right through the chest and watch the light disappear from his eyes…

“Ben, stop!” Katie insisted.

“He killed my mother!” Ben screamed and pushed the accelerator further down. The motor roared in his ears and the wind blew in through the broken window (when had that happened?), drying the tears still swelling up in his eyes.

“Ben, please, listen to me…”

“No!”

“You’re not going to catch him.”

“Watch me!” Ben said, defiantly, but a second later he realized Katie might have meant that in a more practical sense.

The needle in the fuel indicator had descended to plant itself firmly over the E. The engine let out a coughing sound and then it stopped. No matter how much Ben pressed the accelerator, the wheels began slowing down and the distance between them and Manakel’s car became longer and longer.

“No,” Ben muttered under his breath. “No, no, no!”

When the car stopped moving, he opened the door and irrationally sprinted down the empty road, spitting curses until he ran out of breath, until Manakel’s car was nothing but a rapidly disappearing figure in the horizon.

Ben’s empty lungs exploded and his knees gave in. He fell to the ground, instinctively extending his hands in front of him not to hit it face first.

And he didn’t move. He couldn’t any more.

He’d failed. He’d failed her. He’d been so scared, so worried about what might happen to him, that he didn’t even stop to think for a second that everything could go to hell so fast.

And she’d died because he was an idiot child walking in unprepared into a fight he never could’ve won…

Katie’s hand came to rest on his shoulder. It was only when he looked up at her blurry face that he realized he was trying to not breathe. When he did, it came out as an audible, broken gasp. As if every tear he had been holding back flooded his chest and threatened to drown him.

“I’m sorry,” she said, slowly. “Ben, I’m so, so sorry.”

She wrapped her arms around him and he buried his face in her neck.

And he sobbed there until they heard the roar of Dean’s Impala approaching them.

 

* * *

 

The rest of the day passed him by in a haze he couldn’t snap out. He vaguely remembered Dean hugging him and urging him to get into the car and driving back to the bunker, but for the most part, Ben couldn’t recall what was said or by whom. Katie walked him to his room and Mary brought him a strong tasting tea.

Ben didn’t know if it had something in it or if the weight of his grief had just exhausted him completely. He wasn’t sure if he fell asleep hours or just seconds after drinking, to be quite honest. But when he woke up again, the clock over the night stand indicated he had slept most of the day away.

He felt just as tired as when he had closed his eyes. The haze made it hard for him to move. And it would be so easy, so much easier to just stay where he was and keep sleeping…

A question crossed his mind that woke him up with a jolt. His sprang to his bare feet (someone must have taken off his shoes) and half stumbled, half ran outside of his bedroom.

He saw Mary first, coming down the hallway with a platter. She seemed surprised to see him up and about.

“I… I was coming to wake you,” she said. “You haven’t eaten all day and…”

“I’m not hungry,” Ben said. It was true: the only thing he could really feel was that aqueous, heavy ball over his chest. He didn’t think it would ever go away, no matter how much he cried. “Where is she? Where did they take her?”

He didn’t need to clarify who he meant.

Mary carelessly put the platter on the floor and guided him towards a different room.

The place was dimly illuminated by the golden light of several scented candles. Ben saw the figure resting over the bed and for a moment, he was too scared to walk inside, to confront the awful, undeniable reality.

He was alone. His mom, his only real family, his best friend, was gone.

Something moved out of the corner of his eyes. Katie took a step towards him. With her black clothes and black hair, he hadn’t noticed she was there at first.

“I… Dean wanted to wrap her up, prepare her for the pyre,” she explained in a broken voice. Ben was surprised to see her eyes were puffy, as if she too had been crying nonstop all that time. “I told him you’d want to see her.”

Ben forced himself to breathe in, but even with all his effort, he still couldn’t open his mouth to tell her how grateful he was. So he grabbed her hand and squeezed tight instead.

With Katie there, it was easier to take the steps towards the bed.

Lisa looked pale. Her olive skin, that had always been so radiant, was sickly ashen and her lips were almost white. Other than that, she looked fine: her eyes were closed and her hair rested over the pillow, bright and bushy as if someone had just finished brushing it. They had changed her out of her dirty jeans and bloody blouse and put her in what seemed to be an old-fashioned white dress, crossing her arms over her stomach.

If he didn’t come close, he could almost pretend she was just resting.

He forced himself to stretch his hand and gently placed it on her cheek.

It was cold and stiff and _wrong_. His mother’s embrace had always been warm, her hands were always soft.

She wasn’t there. This was just an empty husk with her form.

He almost fell to the floor again, but Katie dragged a chair for him and helped him sit. After a moment, she pulled a chair for herself and settled next to him.

“When… when my dad died, I couldn’t see him,” she told him. “The mother changeling took me before she killed him. I didn’t find out until after I got back and it was… that’s why I thought…”

“Thank you,” Ben whispered. “Thank you so much, Katie.”

She didn’t say anything. She only held his hand and stayed by his side while he cried.

Several people came in and out of the room during the night. Mary brought them some sandwiches and urged them to eat, and though that was the furthest thing from Ben’s mind, he managed to take a couple of bites. Bobby came in too and clasped a hand over his shoulder as he expressed his sympathies. Ben had the impression that the old man’s eyes had seen far too much death and far too many people mourning their loved ones.

Castiel and Jack came in around for in the morning.

“I’m sorry, Ben,” Jack said. He, too, looked as if he had cried. “I’m really sorry. We came as soon as we read Katie’s message.”

Ben didn’t say anything to that. He didn’t want to think, he didn’t want to believe that if he had been a little smarter, if he had called him a little sooner and told them he’d figured out that Manakel was luring them to a trap…

He slowly raised his eyes towards the angel and his son.

“Can you bring her back?”

“No. I’m sorry,” Castiel told him. “With the state Heaven is in, I don’t have enough power. And the reapers wouldn’t allow it in any case. I’m sorry.”

Ben swallowed the rest of his tear. There was nothing left to say, then.

Sam and Dean came at some point near daybreak.

“Ben,” Dean called softly. “It’s… it’s time.”

Ben stood up and looked at him. Dean looked… he didn’t look as devastated as Ben felt. There were bags underneath his eyes as if he hadn’t slept all night and his clothes smelled like alcohol. His lower lip trembled a little, but other than that, he didn’t show signs of having cried as much as Ben had.

But he was right. It had been almost twenty four hours since she’d died. That meant she was going to start decomposing soon, gasses filling up her body and giving her an even ghastlier appearance. It was undignified. Ben couldn’t hold on to this wake any longer.

“I want to help,” he said. “Help… prepare her.”

“Of course. Anything you need.”

They wrapped her up in a white shroud and tied it up along around her legs and chest. They were going to give her a hunter’s funeral, Sam explained as they worked. They were going to salt her body and burn it in a pyre, thus ensuring that her spirit would move on.

“Move on where?” Ben wanted to know.

“Heaven,” Sam said softly.

Ben almost wanted to laugh. That sounded like too simple an answer. And besides, he didn’t think it was necessary. He was sure his mother was already gone.

But it was better than letting her rot in an unmarked grave, he supposed.

Dean picked her up delicately and carried her out of the room, through the library and up the stairs towards the bunker’s door. The sun hadn’t risen outside yet and the air was cool and still. They didn’t say a word as the laid he laid her down on the bed of logs and twigs they had prepared for her. Ben hadn’t noticed Katie stepping outside, but she was there along with Mary, Bobby, Castiel and Jack. They watched in respectful silence as the Winchesters and Ben poured road salt all around Lisa’s body.

Dean grabbed a gasoline can and sprinkled the logs and Lisa herself with it. Finally, he soaked a rag tied around a thick branch to make an improvised torch and lit it up with his own lighter. He stepped closer, but at the last second, he hesitated and looked over his shoulder.

“Ben?”

Ben didn’t want to do it. But he owed it to her to be brave, to be strong. He stepped forwards, took the torch from Dean’s hand and lowered it to light his mother’s pyre. The flames crisped and crackled as they grew to engulf first the wood and then the shroud. A thick column of smoke rose towards the uncaring stars. The heat made Ben’s tears dry fast and his eyes hurt, but he didn’t step back.

“Goodbye, babe,” Dean whispered.

Ben slowly raised his eyes at him. Dean’s tears glimmered at the edge of his eyes as if he couldn’t bring himself to bawl his eyes out the way Ben had done and wanted to do still.

And something curious happened. Ben searched inside him and couldn’t find the anger he felt towards Dean. Nor the disappointment, or the resentment. It was as if his heartache was too powerful, as if it had swollen to occupy every inch of his mind and his body.

Maybe tomorrow he’d be angry with Dean again. But in that moment, Ben just needed him to be his dad.

Dean didn’t react at first when Ben turned around and hid his face against his shoulder. After a moment, Dean’s arms surrounded and held him tight. They didn’t let go until the son had come out and the pyre stopped burning.


	13. Chapter 13

He slept for three days straight. Or at the very least it felt like it.

He simply didn’t have the energy to do much more than just lay in his bed and cry. Every time he thought he was done, he burst into tears all over again. He was crying for his mother, because he was still waiting for her to call him in the morning, telling him breakfast was ready and that he was going to be late for school. He was still waiting for the nightmare to end, for someone to tell him she was okay and happy and safe.

And so he was disappointed and saddened all over again every time he woke up in this little bedroom, in this uncomfortable bed that wasn’t his.

He cried for Lisa, of course, but he also cried for everything else he had lost. He cried for Gary, because he couldn’t save him and at some selfish level, he cried for himself. He cried because his life just wasn’t going to be the same ever again, because he could never go home, he could never go back to his studies, he could never had the future he had imagined for himself.

Everything had changed and he was no taking it well at all. That made it all the worse.

Mary brought him food every day, silently dropping the platter over his night table and reminding him that she was going to come pick it up later, always insisting that he could tell her if he needed anything. Ben didn’t feel hungry, but he forced himself to eat at least some bites every now and again.

He also didn’t feel like talking, which was unfortunate, because a lot of people seemed hell-bent on getting him to do just that.

Jack was the first one to come see him.

“I’m really sorry, Ben. If there was something I could do…”

“You can’t do anything,” Ben said. He was lying on his bed with his back turned to the nephilim. He was starting to lament letting him in when the nephilim had called his door. “You made that pretty clear. So.”

There was silence and Ben was sure that Jack had left, but of course he wasn’t going to be that lucky.

“We were exhausted,” the nephilim said. “We just came back from another fight. Those angels… they almost overwhelmed us and we couldn’t…”

“It’s fine,” Ben replied. “I don’t blame you.”

He couldn’t say what he was really thinking: that above all else, he blamed himself. He had sent Jack, Sam and Dean to that trap. If they hadn’t been able to come sooner or to fight better, that was on Ben. And if there was the minimal chance that any of that would’ve made a difference, if them coming in a second earlier would’ve saved his mother, then…

He stopped. He couldn’t bear to follow that thought to its inevitable conclusion. He knew, deep inside, that it had all been his fault, but he was sure if he allowed himself to think about it for more than a few seconds, he would break forever.

Sam was also interested in trying to talk to him.

“Look, I get it,” he said. “You’re hurting and it feels like it’s never going to end…”

“You _get it_?” Ben snapped at him. The ridiculousness of that statement gave him enough energy to sit up and glare at the man that was his uncle, he supposed. He had an Uncle Sam. That was hilarious. Ben wasn’t sure he could ever laugh at anything again, but it was hilarious. “Really? That’s what you’re going to go with? You _get it_?”

Sam sighed, as if he had somehow known that was the reaction that Ben was going to have but he’d needed to make an attempt to talk to him nonetheless.

“I do understand, Ben,” he told him. “Dean and I, we have lost so many friends through the years. We lost our father…”

“So what, you’re going to tell me that I need to get over it and get back on my feet? Is this is a misery contest? Do you want to measure up how much sadder you are than I am?” Ben let out a bitter laugh. “Newsflash: you and Dean? You always had each other. But my mom… she was all I had. Especially because your dick of a brother walked out on us. So don’t come to me with this bullshit of you ‘understanding it’.” He drew air quotes in the air and took a deep breath.

To his surprise, Sam didn’t try to defend what Dean had done or to tell him that it had been for their own good or something equally asinine. He probably figured, correctly, that Ben wasn’t going to believe him anyway.

“You have every right to be angry, Ben,” he said, instead. “And you have the right to grieve in whatever way you need to. But I just want you to remember that we are your family too. If you want us to be. If you can ever forgive us.”

“Yeah, well… I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you,” Ben replied, settling back down on the bed and turning his back on Sam.

He felt bad about it afterwards. Yes, he was rightfully angry, but it still had been a cruel thing to say. He didn’t really know Sam at all. He’d seen the guy maybe twice in his life before and Dean had never talked much about him. Ben had the impression it was just too painful for him. So he couldn’t really judge what kind of person Sam was, but he had the impression his offer for Ben to be part of the family had been sincere.

So he made an effort later that day to get up, get in the shower and put on some clean clothes. It took time. He stood underneath the stream until his fingertips became creasy and his entire body felt like it had been cleanse of the tiredness and grime he had accumulated during those days. He didn’t exactly feel better, but at the very least his head was lighter and the sensation that he was buried under three tons of pure crap remitted a little bit.

The bunker was silent as he stepped out of his room. He got lost on the way to the kitchen, but eventually, after turning around and heading down a different hallway, he managed to make it there. To his surprise, he found Dean standing in front of the counter. Ben hesitated for a moment, but then he decided he really had nothing to lose and stepped forwards. Dean heard him coming and turned around.

“Hey,” he greeted him. “How are you feeling, kid?”

“Make a wild guess.” Ben crooked an eyebrow and Dean lowered his eyes, giving him the reason. Ben still came a little closer. “What are you making?”

“Burgers,” Dean said, showing him the container with meat ready to be given form. “You want to help?”

It took a second for Ben to decide, but the alternative was going back to keep crying in his room. So he washed his hands and picked some meat. For a while, they worked in silence and Ben almost let himself believe that perhaps this wouldn’t be so bad. Perhaps they could reach some sort of truce, they could have some sort of relationship after all.

It all came undone in a matter of moments, though.

“I remember when you used to make these for neighborhood barbecue,” Ben commented. “Mr. Lance ate like four and then he was puking in our bathroom.”

“Mr. Lance?” Dean repeated, frowning.

“Our neighbor from down the street?”

“Oh, that guy,” Dean remembered. “Always thought he was a bit of a dick.”

Ben laughed at that comment. Mr. Lance _was_ a bit of a dick, always flashing his expensive watch and telling him exactly how he wanted his lawn to be mowed. And he never tipped. But his daughter, Susie, was a very pretty girl. Ben had gone to homecoming with her during his junior year. Lisa had tied his bow tie and gave him a very stern talk about how he had to respect Susie and hold the door for her and be a gentleman…

He forced himself to stop thinking about it. He was going to get sad all over again.

“Did Castiel erase his memories too?”

Dean stopped making the burgers and threw him an undecipherable look.

“Why are you asking that?”

“Just… you know. It must have been weird for the neighbors that one day you were there and the next you just… weren’t.”

Ben was starting to regret bringing any of that up, especially when Dean reminded him:

“I assume your mother told them she broke up with me. That was before the demons came for you.”

“Right,” Ben muttered bitterly. He placed the last burger he’d made along with the others. He couldn’t think of another topic to bring up fast enough, so they were stuck in this awkward conversation now. Dean put his burgers aside and cleaned his hands with a towel.

“She was right to do that,” he declared. “Losing you two was the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through, but I never blamed her for not wanting to be a part of… all of this.”

“But we _were_ a part of it,” Ben insisted. “Even if you walked away. Even now. Maybe we would’ve been safer if you’d just stayed…”

“Ben, stop.”

Dean’s tone was cutting and it surprised Ben just how angry he looked. He stepped away from him, shaking his head. He threw the towel over his shoulder and leaned against the table, all very slowly, as if he was thinking of what to say next. Which was why it was sort of underwhelming when he simply declared:

“There are things you just don’t understand.”

“Then explain them to me. I want to know why and…”

“No, Ben.”

“Why not?” Ben insisted, frustrated. “Why won’t you talk to me?”

“Because you’re a _child_!” Dean replied, raising his voice. “Okay? You’re _my_ child. I have to take care of you and I can’t do that if you’re going to be running headfirst into things you can’t handle and putting everyone in danger!”

The astonishment left Ben speechless. There was so much bullshit in that statement that he didn’t even know where to begin, from the fact that Dean still saw him as a little boy, to him thinking that he would only be able to protect him if he kept quiet about all the things that were endangering him.

But the worst of all was that he was a little bit right. He had ran headfirst into something he didn’t understand. And his mother had died as a result.

Did Dean blame him as much as Ben blamed himself?

He didn’t want to find out. He stepped back and threw Dean a bitter smile.

“Right. Daddy knows best, I guess,” he mumbled and walked out of the kitchen, ignoring Dean’s pleas for him to come back.

Coming out of his room had been a mistake. He locked himself away to sleep for another three days and everything was much of the same.

On the seventh day, someone knocked on his door again. That confused Ben. Mary usually knocked, but she immediately opened the door to leave the food for him and then quietly left again. This time, the knock came again and Ben had no choice but to get up and open the door.

Katie was on the other side, holding a pizza box in one hand and several DVDs on the other.

“Movie night?” she said, in the most casual, calm way ever. She pushed past him and left the pizza on the floor before she started spreading the DVDs on his messed up bed. “I have _Die Hard_ , every single _Fast and the Furious_ , _Terminator_ … well, maybe not that one.” She grimaced and put it aside. “So, what you want to watch?”

Ben couldn’t react at first. Everything about this was a bit too surreal.

“Umh… _Die Hard_ , maybe?”

“Okay.” Katie picked the DVD and walked towards the TV. “The pizza’s gonna get cold, so I’d dig into it if I were you.”

She didn’t ask him how he was doing. She didn’t tell him she was sorry for his loss. She just sat by his side on the bed, on her socks, ate pizza and watched as Bruce Willis mowed down an entire building full of terrorists.

Amazingly, Ben began to realize that was exactly what he had needed all of this time. For someone not to patronize him or pity him, but to distract him, to talk to him like a normal person and do normal stuff with him for a while.

“You know, there are some action movies that aged horribly,” Katie commented as she ate all the crusts he had left. “This one will stand the test of time forever. You want to watch another one?”

Ben was tempted to tell her yes and to turn off his brain to watch mindless action for another two hours, but maybe it was better that he actually asked all the questions he had. He grabbed the remote and turned off the TV.

“I thought you had left.”

“Nah. Where would I even go? I’m fucked.” Katie said with a shrug. “Unless you wouldn’t try to rescue me if I were kidnapped or possessed by an angel.”

Ben thought about it for a moment. Slowly, because he hadn’t done it in a while, he smiled.

“Oh, no. You’re definitely fucked.”

“Thought so.”

She giggled and suddenly, his grim, dimly lit room wasn’t as depressing as before.

“But you didn’t come to see me,” Ben pointed out.

Katie broke the crust and grinded it, reducing it to crumbs with ease.

“I figured you needed some time alone. From all the locking yourself away in here and refusing to come out or talk to anybody.”

Ben lowered his eyes. She definitely had a point there.

“I’m sorry. I just…”

“Ben.” Katie slid a hand through the bed and squeezed his. “You don’t have to apologize to me.”

There was just something so easy, so familiar, of being by her side like this, talking about issues that they could never talk to anyone else about. Once again, he felt guilty for forgetting all the times they had done something like that and happy that, at the very least, they could do it again now.

“So what were you doing?” he asked her.

“Reading. About angels and demons, mostly. Having Bobby correct my Latin pronunciation like three hundred times. Memorizing how to draw some Enochian wards.” She made a pause and continued in a lower tone of voice, as if she was telling him a secret: “And also, finding out where the really cool weapons and false IDs are. Turns out, Sam and Dean keep most of them in the trunk of their car, underneath a false bottom. It wasn’t really even that hard to break into it.”

“Wait… you stole from them?”

“Yup.” Katie showed no signs of feeling bad about it. “And I hid it all away in a green Ford T-bird in the garage. The car is a beast and the gas mileage’s probably not environmentally friendly, but there’s no need to hot-wire it. The keys were in the glove compartment.”

Ben took a few seconds to process the implications of what she was saying.

“So, you _are_ leaving.”

“No, _we_ are leaving,” she corrected him. “I started preparing after you had that fight with your dad.”

“Oh. You heard that.”

“Everyone in the bunker heard it, Ben,” Katie replied. “You weren’t exactly whispering.”

Ben stood up and paced around the room. He couldn’t believe that Katie was suggesting they should get back on the road, to the danger of being out in the open and hunted and pursued.

He couldn’t believe he was considering it.

“That’s insane,” he said. “Why… what would we even do out there?”

“Anything you want. Road trip to the Grand Canyon. Check out the world’s second biggest ball of yarn.” She stopped talking for a few seconds and then added, quieter: “Hunt Manakel. Rescue Gary.”

Ben said nothing. He couldn’t quite believe that Katie had correctly guessed what thoughts had been plaguing him for the last couple of days. He couldn’t stay in that room groveling forever. Eventually he would have to get out, but he couldn’t go back to what had been before, he would have to move forwards. Make a different plan.

“Sam and Dean can do that,” he said in the end. But even to him his words sounded empty.

“Sam and Dean are going to put a blade through his heart and not even try to save your friend,” Katie shot back. She stood up as well and walk up to him to look at him in the eye. “Look, I’m not saying is going to be easy. It most definitely won’t. It won’t solve the issue of the archangel wanting to ride your ass….”

“Gross, _Katherine_.”

“But it will give you something to do, _Benjamin_ ,” she continued, undeterred. “Something to focus on. That’s… that’s important to have in moments like these.”

Ben scratched his arm.

“Do you really think I have what it takes to be a hunter?”

“No,” Katie said, bluntly. “But neither did I when I started. No one did. And, look, just because all of this is like, your legacy, or something, it doesn’t mean you have to go for it. You can do what Dean wants you to do and have a normal life. You can ask Jack to put the wall in your memory back up again. Hell, I wouldn’t blame you.” She stopped herself and glanced away, as if she had said too much. “At least it would be your choice this time, right?”

She didn’t say what that would mean for her, but she didn’t have to.

“Katie…”

“But if you do decide to come hunting with me,” she went on, “just let me know. I’m ready to go when you are.”

She left the room without another word. Not that any was really necessary.

Ben finished the rest of the pizza and decided to sleep on it. Which meant, of course, that he was up at two in the morning staring at the ceiling, wide awake. In the end, he stood up, picked the empty pizza box and left his room to throw it in the trash.

He got lost even worse than before, which gave him plenty of time to think about what Katie had said. Did he even want to keep those painful memories, that terrible knowledge to himself?

Yes. Whether he left with Katie or not, he was going to keep his memory. He’d rather know the truth, about who he was, about what that meant.

He eventually wandered his way into the kitchen and by now, he was starting to realize there was always someone in there, no matter the hour of the night or the day.

This time, it was Mary. She sat on the table, a steaming mug of tea in front of her. She smiled at him graciously when he stepped inside.

“You can’t sleep either?” she asked gently. “Why don’t you sit? I’ll make some tea for you too.”

“Does tea really help?” Ben wanted to know.

“No, not really. But I try to convince myself it does.” Mary opened the cabinets and took out a mug. “Especially when the boys are out. I know what they’re capable of, but I still worry about them.”

“They’re gone?” Ben asked, frowning.

“They caught whiff of a possible case. Most likely a werewolf. Said that they needed to take care of that.”

“Right.” Ben stared into the dark liquid for a moment. “Or maybe Dean just didn’t want to face the possibility of running into me again here.”

“Could have been a bit of that, too,” Mary admitted. “They left me to watch over the fort.”

“And to babysit me and Katie,” Ben guessed.

Mary laughed and place the sugar bowl closer to him. Ben had never been a fan of tea, but he dropped two spoonful of sugar into it and tried it.

“I don’t mind caring for you. You’re going through a rough time and… Dean isn’t helping, is he?” Mary sighed. “I told him he should’ve talked to you. I told him he can’t keep you safe by keeping you in the dark, but… he’s so stubborn. There’s just so much of John in him.”

“Who’s John?”

Mary raised her eyes, with a bitter smile.

“My husband,” she said. “Your grandfather.”

Ben didn’t ask any more. It was still hard to wrap his head around all he was finding out about the Winchester side of the family. He quietly sipped his tea, pondering.

Whenever he’d had a problem he needed to solve, he had gone to his mother to tell her about it and she’d always known exactly what to say to him. She’d always said all mothers had a sixth sense that allowed them to give the right advice at the right time.

Maybe grandmothers were the same.

“Can I… can I tell you something if you promise not to tell Dean?”

Mary promised him, so Ben told her: about what Katie had said, about how he didn’t trust Sam and Dean to try to rescue Gary, about how he was considering going out into the world, with all the danger that would imply, and take this matter into his own hands.

Mary’s eyes were wide open when he finished talking.

“Ben, that’s insane.”

“Yeah, I know,” Ben agreed. He’d fucked up. Now Dean would find out for sure and Katie would be mad that he’d ruined her perfect escape plan.

“But I think you should do it.”

Something in the tea must have made him really confused, because there was no way she’d what Ben just heard her say.

“Come again?”

“When I came back… and that’s a really long story for another time,” she added before Ben could ask what she meant. “I had to spend some time away to figure some things out for myself. You have just a lot of traumatic memories returned to you. You’ve lost your mother. You’re finding out this world that is completely new to you and you can’t really put your thoughts in order here, where you’re either reminded of everything that has happened or fighting with your dad. You’re very young, that’s true. But you’re also a very smart boy.”

She made a pause.

“I’m inclined to agree with Dean, that you should have a normal life, as normal as it can be. But I also know that we can’t force you to want that for yourself. So if you’re going to try your hand at hunting… it’s best that you do it knowing you have our support. That you can stop and turn back at any moment. If we try to keep you here, then you’re going to leave without telling us anything and that’s going to be all the worse.”

“But what about Michael and Lucifer?”

“We’ll deal with them,” Mary said. “That’s not your battle and it’s terrible that you were dragged into it. But I don’t think Manakel will come after you again, not with the mess he’s made. That probably didn’t impress Michael much. And you’ve cloaked yourself from the angels, so as long as you keep a low profile, they shouldn’t be able to find you.”

“Unless I run directly towards them,” Ben pointed out.

“And I trust you won’t do that unless you’re really sure of what you’re doing and without giving us a call,” Mary said, throwing him a very serious glare. “And that’s another thing. You’re gonna call me every day. Or text me or… FaceTime. Whatever it is that you kids do.”

Ben had to laugh at that. For the first time, she’d sounded exactly as he’d always imagined grandmothers would sound.

“Dean is going to be furious.”

“Yes, he will be,” Mary agreed. “Which is why you and Katie should leave before he comes back.”

There was no arguing with that logic.

“Thanks, Mary,” Ben said. “Can I call you Nana?”

“Absolutely not!”

The horror in her voice was enough to make him laugh for the first time in what felt like ages.

 

* * *

 

They were ready to leave at dawn. Mary gave them a thermos full of coffee and some sandwiches for the road.

“Call me up when you stop. Make sure no one is following you. Have you weapons ready.”

“Yes, Mrs. Winchester,” Katie said, obediently.

Mary narrowed her eyes at her.

“You’re going to take care of him, aren’t you?”

“To the best of my abilities, yes,” Katie promised.

Mary relaxed a little after that, though not a lot. Ben figured they should go before she changed her mind.

“Ben?” she called him as he was about to get inside of the car. When he turned towards him, she handed him the leather bound journal where he had read the exorcism from. “This was my husband’s. I added some things at the end. Read it. It might help you understand us better.” She stopped. “It might help you understand your dad better.”

“Okay. Thank you, Mary.”

Mary patted his cheek and smiled at him, though the worry in her eyes was undisguisable. Ben found she wasn’t the only one who was hesitating.

But he had already made a choice and he wasn’t backing down now.

The T-bird roared to life as soon as Katie turned on the ignition.

“Woah, you were right,” Ben commented. “This thing’s a beast. Are you gonna let me drive it later?”

“No way, dude. Finders’ keepers.”

Ben argued that Katie hadn’t really found the car, to which Katie replied that he was being obnoxiously picky about the details. They argued, but not really, until they were both laughing themselves to tears as if they didn’t have a care in the world, as if they were leaving everything they had ever feared behind them.

The open road waited for them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you very much for reading!


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